Report to Database

A common gig for my consulting company these days is plugging gaps in other vendor's infrastructures.

Once upon a time, this gig was pretty pleasant: every IT-consuming manager seemed to understand that what they bought would be, at best, 80% of what was needed, so they kept time in the schedule and money in the budget to get as much of the last 20% as they could. We were brought in early and worked with the vendor to produce a happy client.

More recently, we find that larger vendors are squeezing us out, but not by doing a great job: instead, the larger vendors are often over-promising, under-delivering, dangling the promise of cheap, expert consulting and customization that never seems to materialize. But when the initial installation is done, the deadline is past and the budget is exceeded.

As a result of this successful strategy, we are brought in when it is too late, when users are fried and management is angry, when time is short and money hard to come by.

The typical story goes like this:

1. Client considers an enterprise solution (ES) so expensive, it must do all that one could ever want. This thinking seems incredibly naive to me, but there you are.
   
2. During the sales phase, the answer to all questions is "yes, of course it does" or "of course we will" or "we are installed in X other similar companies, trust us." I would expect this to raise red flags, but it does not seem to.
   
3. During the implementation phase,  a different team from the same vendor finds many previous claims to be absurd--"I can't believe that any of our people ever told you that" is what I hear.
   
4. When the smoke clears on the installation, the client finds a given business process is not supported by the mighty ES, even by cobbling together functionality from various modules. The vendor's consulting teams come and tell the client to either stop wanting the given functionality or to wait for some bright day when that functionality is released.
   
5. For whichever of these failures simply cannot be tolerated, we are called in to plug the gap by providing the required functionality "outboard" of the ES

Given how we come into the environment, it is no surprise that our relationship with the ES vendor is not great.  Often the patch requires interaction with the ES database and support from the vendor is either terrible or non-existent. The idea that we all have the same goal (making the client happy) and the same boss (the client)  seems to be quite dead.

In this case, I often only have a database black box and a report with at least an identifier and a value for the column I seek. Even when we get schema documentation, it is usually, ahem, bare bones and, shall we say, "out of date."

So I sigh deeply, put on my favorite database hacking music and do the following:

1. I get permission to use the database (usually a secondary copy)
2. I get credentials with which to access the database
3. I am a terrifically ethical person, so I would never decompile someone else's software to get the required information. That would be wrong. Even though the client paid for the database and the software.
4. I use whatever database description hooks I have, eg MySQL's "show database" and "show tables" and "show columns" commands, or the local equivalent. I have a suite of database debugging tools leftover from a previous incarnation as a database vendor, so I can crack databases even if those databases are not relational databases
5. I write programs to take the outline of the schema and for each table:
1. get the list of columns and data types
2. select all  columns for all rows
1. check each column against the known values
2. store every hit: table:column:value
3. manually review the output, form guesses about the schema
4. write programs based on guesses, eq frequency distributions
5. refine guesses about the schema and data based on evidence

If all goes well, after a rather long time, I will have some significant clues to the schema and how the column I care about is named, in which table it lives and how it is used. I can then do what I have to do in the way of pre-processing or post-processing.

I often find out enough to continue to provide patches for various deficiencies until someone figures out that the mighty ES, which should have ended all need for IT work, is being augmented in this way and forbids any more work.

Thank God a new mighty ES seems to come along every couple of years, so I guess this cycle will keep me off the street for a while yet.