I had to volunteer to support a customized CRM software release the other day. Since it is CRM-call center related software, it had critical time lines for implementation and rollback if anything got messed up.
First of all, I want to vent my anger towards this software that costs a few millions.Its production deployment involves running 1000 different scripts and copying over 1000 different files - stone age kind of way to deal with an Internet age solution.
But the actual nightmare was related to cross platform voes. There was a bunch of SQL scripts that needed to run against a DB2 database. Unfortunately, this database happens to be in a Mainframe computer. For tests, we could always run these scripts from our development PC using any damn client. But due to "processes" this has to be run via a JCL on the mainframe itself. There starts the nightmare.
Mainframe does not like a file which has more than 80 characters in a line- or at least the damn JCL was set up to behave like that. Now, we sit down and format the whole bunch of scripts ( yes, we were too short on time to write a script now) and then "upload" it to in to the Mainframe. The JCL again "Abends". One person informs that the JCL expects 72(what the heck?) characters per line. Well, we go reformat again, and upload it to mainframe "datasets". Hm! oh as I am writing this, I just realized that it was not the Mainframe to be blamed.- I got to change the title of this post.
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