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What affected the reliability of the system?: Sybase

Sybase was the database server chosen for the Multinational system. It was an open systems SQL database which they initially ran on a Novell PC server (00573). They had two major problems with Sybase on Novell which eventually led to the migration of the larger servers to Unix. The first problem occurred during phase I and resulted in a PC losing its connection to the database. Eventually Sybase solved this by installing a different communications protocol but not before the team had spent two weeks installing a trap in the software to report the error rather more gracefully to the users (00337). The second problem occurred during phase II and caused the server to hang intermittently (00574, 01058). This problem could not be reproduced and appeared to go away for weeks at a time only to re-occur several times on one day (00522, 00633).

These two problems illustrate the difficulties of working with a complex layer of software. There was nothing that the development team could do to resolve the errors except hope that Sybase could solve the problem (00561). As they are a large company they did have some influence with Sybase although they did wonder whether they would have had better support from a more UK-based company such as Oracle (00337). Users, of course, can not usually differentiate between application and system software problems (01058, 00595). In the end the second problem was only solved by migrating to Unix at great expense (00558, 00042, 00634).

One of the advantages of migrating to Unix was that it was a much more advanced version of Sybase that included the concept of Replication which automatically supported a distributed database and provided mirroring for backup (00526, 00138). Installation of the Unix version of Sybase seemed to be straightforward despite the greater opportunities for configuration under Unix (00763). This could have been because their database was relatively small with the largest table holding only 170,000 records (00763) but they also used Sybase consultancy to explain to the team the design issues that need to be considered in writing efficicent SQL (00761).

Social influence:
Technical influence:
IT environment: Development software

Commentary
Social influence
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