My customer is doing an acceptance test of my latest code changes. Things are not working well. Initiially I found that they were getting blocked by one of the business rules in the system. Then I determined they were running the wrong scripts. Finally the code was getting an Oracle error.The pressure was mounting. I got on a conference call with a bunch of managers. I needed to figure this out fast. The script that was bombing was not huge. But the SQL in it was massive. Lots of joins and unions and large predicates. Ouch. How was I going to figure this out?
Then I decided to try to find a shortcut. The call stack said a function in a PL/SQL package was actually generating the exception. I checked and found we got lucky. There were only two places where the script accessed the package. Bamm. We were trying to construct a date with a value that is sometimes aritificially too large.
Sometimes you can get saved by a little divide and conquery.
