Our customer had some high priority problems. The original developer working on the problem was not making enough progress. So the problem got reassigned to me. I had a late breakthrough on the problem. Apparently one of our application's metadata tables got out of sync. So I needed to write a script to fix the data. The challenge was that it was very late when I made the discovery. And the customer wanted the fix now.
Here are some more details on the problem. We have a main table with read-only data. It has a lot of records (maybe 30 or 40 millions records and growing). The application makes use of a second database table containing meta data with around 10,000 records. Unfortunately there were multiple problems with the meta data. Some of the records did not belong in the table. And other records were missing.
Given such small amount of time to write a fix, I just hacked out a brute force method. I removed all the meta data records. Then I went through the 40 million records in the source data and reconstructed the meta data table. I did some quick performance tests and they looked ok. So I am planning to ship the fix as is. The main driver of this design was the limited development time. Had I more time to work on the script, I could have built in some smarts which only added and removed a small amount of records. However this would have taken much longer to code and test.
This is usually the trade off in software maintenance. I hope the script runs fast enough when it gets deployed to Production.
