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Seems to me if there's a bunch of apps dependent on that legacy data, that cleanup could have been done more usefully and elegantly in the database with some vi

Seems to me if there's a bunch of apps dependent on that legacy data, that cleanup could have been done more usefully and elegantly in the database with some views anyone could use. Or, if for some reason views couldn't be added (lack of access) a set of generic CTE includes?

kstrauser 5y ago
Sigh, if only. OK, so the rest of the story was that the original app was written in Visual FoxPro. I was hired to build a web frontend for it. Well, turns out 1) there is, or at least was, no native VFP client for Unix, and 2) the Windows client was single threaded per host, so you couldn't even farm the connectivity out to a Windows process. After struggling with this for a while -- a cluster of Win XP hosts running a single-threaded VFP client and serving results to a Linux webserver via XMLRPC, as was the custom at the time -- I finally said "screw this, let's brute force it." That turned into https://github.com/kstrauser/pgdbf https://github.com/kstrauser/pgdbf, which is an app to convert a VFP table into a PostgreSQL table. We had it running on a cron job, which worked fine because the website was read-only and it was the VFP app that was actually writing to the tables. It was alright to have up to a few hours of latency between the VFP view of the data and the PostgreSQL view of it. When the company later committed to rewriting the VFP app in a sane language, they wrote it to run directly against PostgreSQL. That was quite a few years after I'd started there, though.
- jmnicolas 5y ago
  You should receive a medal! I feel so dirty after just reading this, that I have to take a shower! ;)
  - kstrauser 5y ago
    Sometimes ya just do what ya’ve gotta do. :) At the time, I was so heads-down with the day to day challenges that I didn’t really think about it. It wasn’t until later that the enormity of it really sunk in.

kstrauser 5y ago

Sigh, if only. OK, so the rest of the story was that the original app was written in Visual FoxPro. I was hired to build a web frontend for it. Well, turns out 1) there is, or at least was, no native VFP client for Unix, and 2) the Windows client was single threaded per host, so you couldn't even farm the connectivity out to a Windows process. After struggling with this for a while -- a cluster of Win XP hosts running a single-threaded VFP client and serving results to a Linux webserver via XMLRPC, as was the custom at the time -- I finally said "screw this, let's brute force it." That turned into https://github.com/kstrauser/pgdbf https://github.com/kstrauser/pgdbf, which is an app to convert a VFP table into a PostgreSQL table. We had it running on a cron job, which worked fine because the website was read-only and it was the VFP app that was actually writing to the tables. It was alright to have up to a few hours of latency between the VFP view of the data and the PostgreSQL view of it. When the company later committed to rewriting the VFP app in a sane language, they wrote it to run directly against PostgreSQL. That was quite a few years after I'd started there, though.

jmnicolas 5y ago
You should receive a medal! I feel so dirty after just reading this, that I have to take a shower! ;)
- kstrauser 5y ago
  Sometimes ya just do what ya’ve gotta do. :) At the time, I was so heads-down with the day to day challenges that I didn’t really think about it. It wasn’t until later that the enormity of it really sunk in.