Plan "B"

Everything's going fine on this project that I can almost put to bed, when its fragile nature shows itself in some pretty ugly ways. Imagine a string of database connections very similar to a daisy chain. Like a real chain of daisys - ya' know? They're fragile as you can imagine, and if even one daisy goes limp, the whole chain breaks. Now, imagine each daisy under the control of a different person who doesn't know about the other people in the chain. Database design changes, maintenance windows and a whole host of other problems at a single point can bring the whole thing down to its knees. Now, imagine that this daisy chain stretches from here to the moon, and you'll understand how fragile it is.

O.K. not the best design, and I'm working on some autonomic solutions, but in the meanwhile it's more like an unfunded "do it on your own time" project of personal conquest. I need to program a way for the system to say, "give me the latest data you have, but if you don't have any data, then give me the most recent data I'm aware of or have stored locally." "Oh, and I need to handle changes in the design as well, so magically pick out the items that are important to me and link them to the other daisys in the chain."

Now, that would be a neat trick.

On the brighter side. 23 DAYS UNTIL THE CRUISE!!! w00t! I can't wait. I was looking through some pictures from my first cruise to Mexico. Wow! That was fun.