Those who can, do ...

It's the mid-1990s, and this pilot fish is on the team implementing a manufacturing application at a big factory.

"We're under heavy pressure to crank out essential reports that the old system provided by the time the new system goes live, and we have a new developer anxious to make a name for himself," says fish.

"In fact, his bravado prompts one manufacturing user on the implementation team to claim, 'You'll be working for him shortly.'"

This crack developer appears to be cranking out code in record time, even though he's pretty short on coding experience.

But that code doesn't seem to be running very efficiently. One of his reports, which provides information on the raw material requirements when an order is imported, seems to be taking a very long time to complete.

Fish points this out to him. "Not so," developer says. "See here in the log file? That report ran in a nanosecond." Sure enough, the time stamp for the beginning and ending of the run have exactly the same value.

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Which, it turns out, isn't a surprise after fish goes over the code. It turns out the developer gets the system time at the beginning of his program, writes it to the log -- and then doesn't happen to update the value again before writing it to the log when the program completes.

Maybe it would be good to get a fresh system time at the end of your program, fish suggests to programmer. And you might check to see if your rules-based SQL code is using indexes, once you find out how long the program really takes.

"We're not certain any of this person's code ever really worked as billed," fish says. "But about six months later, our go-getter left for big bucks to become an Oracle instructor."

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