I work in a JAVA shop, but since I’ve been a programmer for 40 years I get called on to fix the legacy apps floating around the workplace. I’ve used systems starting with Fortran (with format) in 1970. I’ve coded in a dozen flavors of Basic, COBOL, BAL,Mark IV, Focus, Ramis, Snowball, C, C++, Pascal, MASM, Java, PHP, and a bunch languages that I had to learn for single projects that I have since forgotten.
I maintain one app that uses palm pilots that transmit data to an Excel spreadsheet that updates an Access database that is linked to an Adaptive Server Anywhere 9.0 db. It is a Rube Goldberg setup.
The network people moved the server, changing the name and the IP address. In order to route through the very large network, the ODB drivers needs to have the string HOST=SERVERNAME in the Network tab connection string. The network changeover failed miserably due to badly configured ports on the switch so all departments who use the database on the renamed server were slow or knocked off the system. This it turned out was a red herring and the real problem would take a week to fix.
After getting it all working, the Access portion of the system still refused to work.
It turns out that when MS Access is linked to a remote db it remembers the ODBC parameters. Even when I went into ODBC setup and changed the server, the MS Access database still remembered the way it was set up 10 years ago. I had the idea to reconnect the linked tables last night in a dream. My mind is still working on this crap even when I am asleep.
I’d love to trash this system and replace it with an nice web based one with Java or PHP, but the powers that be won’t kill a system that still works.