Re: [gentoo-user] PostgreSQL Vs MySQL @Uber

[J. Roeleveld]

On Monday, August 01, 2016 09:07:05 PM Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 1, 2016 at 1:31 PM, J. Roeleveld <joost@××××××××.org> wrote:
> > On Monday, August 01, 2016 11:01:28 AM Rich Freeman wrote:
> >> Neither my employer nor the big software provider
> >> in question is likely to attract top-notch DB talent (indeed, mine has
> >> steadily gotten rid of anybody who knows how to do anything in Oracle
> >> beyond creating schemas it seems,
> >
> > Actively? Or by simply letting the good ones go while replacing them with
> > someone less clued up?
>
> A bit of both.  A big part of it was probably sacking anybody doing
> anything other than creating tables (since you can't keep operating
> without that), and outsourcing to 3rd parties and wanting
> bottom-dollar prices.

Yes, one of the more common decisions. Often because the person hired to 
handle the department comes from an outsourcing company or because they happen 
to meet at the golf course.

> There are accidentally some reasonably competent people in IT at my
> company, but I don't think it is because we really are good at
> targeting world-class talent.

I wonder which companies are actually good at that?

> > The problem is that the likes of Informatica (one
> > of the leading ETL software vendors) don't actually support PostgreSQL.
>
> Please tell me that it actually does support xml in a sane way, and it
> is only our incompetent developers who seem to be hand-generating xml
> files by printing strings?

<OT>
There are actually 2 supported methods (not counting randomly sticking strings 
together):

1) The default XML handling (source/target and transformation). This sort-of 
works for "simple" XML files. The definition for "simple" is in the sales-
contract: No more then ?? levels deep, XSD less then ???MB and XML file less 
than ???MB. I don't remember the actual numbers, but check with whoever has 
the actual contract in your company. It should be listed there or call 
Informatica support.

2) B2B / UDO. The UDO stands for Unstructured Data Option. Bit strange, but 
that's where it lives. It's a proper XML handling engine that should be able 
to handle any XML you care to throw at it. Also documents with a standardised 
layout. It's the preferred method of handling XML files with Informatica. (Do 
use at least 9.6.1 for this. 9.5 has a very annoying feature...

</OT>

> I have an integration that involves Informatica, and another solution
> that just synchronizes files from an smb share to a foreign FTP site.
> Of course I don't have access to the share that lies in-between, so
> when the interface breaks I get to play with two different groups to
> try to figure out where the process died.  Informatica appears to be
> running on Unix and I get helpful questions from the maintainers about
> what path the files are on, as if I'd have any idea where some SMB
> share (whose path I am not told) is mounted on some Unix server I have
> no access to.

Check the session-log (from Informatica), that should contain the actual path 
Informatica uses to write the file to.

> Gotta love division of labor.  Heaven forbid anybody have visibility
> to the full picture so that the right group can be engaged on the
> first try...

I see this all too often. They usually claim it's because of security. Not 
understanding that by obscuring all the details, the first person to get the 
full picture is the one going to cause havoc and the people that are then 
tasked to fix it, don't know enough to do it right in a reasonable time-frame.

--
Joost