' ... something I've definitely learned in the last few months, is to be careful of what you're doing, especially with data. ... another thing I do is, if people want data amending on the system which they cannot change themselves because of the way the system has been designed, we get them to fill a form out and get them to authorise a data change. These things terrify me, because they come in and you're there hitting the database directly ... I write straight sql but I do it with a transaction ... when it comes back and says so many rows affected, that's right and you go and look at the rows even then when you do the commit tran it's a question of when you press that key, you know. ...X043 page 001.05f (tape 06.2.05) Alan Notes/Tape 14/06/94We have a copy up here [of the live system] which is usually about a week or so out of date so ... I tested up here what I was going to do first just to check out what I was doing was right. Because even so when I go on to the live one it's still a bit hairy, I'm not particularly happy.
... about a week ago, Keith rang up to ask about what he wanted to do was take programmes and policy information and they wanted us to copy bits of it, selected by them onto a new policy and programme and let them change some things and we could copy other bits that they'd say and I just couldn't believe he was asking this, but obviously he didn't understand the complexities and I basically said..I didn't say no we're not going to do this, I said I'm unhappy about doing this at all and in the end I spoke to Gordan about this and said this is potentially a very dangerous thing to do. And it didn't go ahead.
And you know this is..that's probably the thing that scares me most about the work I do at times. Because when I consider how little experience I've got in the team, how little experience I've got of computing, I think I've got quite a lot of responsibility in terms of what I'm doing at times. ... I actually said that the time that it would take me to make the changes, be happy with the changes, check it and test that the database was still ok as such in terms of the relationships with other tables and so on, they could have done it themselves anyway. ... if some one asked me to make these changes, ... I would do it using the system. I would not do it by making changes so it's going to take me as long as it's going to take you. ... But the underlying thing was this is your job isn't it not my job. ... '
Social influence: | Individual: Experience |
Technical influence: | System characteristics: Functionality |
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Recording |
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Story |
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Social influence |
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Technical influence |
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© Clare Tagg 2000