The Beginning of the End

Geekery / May 18, 2009 / John / 2

So, it’s Monday morning on the week of The Grand Architecture Migration. Frankly, I’m shitting myself about it. We’ve covered everything as comprehensively as possible, but there’s always that little niggle of doubt.

Thing is, we have a limited time window in which to operate – a matter of a couple of days. If the migration fails to happen in this time, we have to roll back an continue with the old, unreliable, risky platform.

Back up a couple of paces. Basically, we’re taking a HUGE oracle web app and porting it from knackered old Sun boxes in London to shiny little Linux boxes in Edinburgh. So there’s endian issues to begin with. There’s also the problem of having to run an older version of Oracle as the whole webapp relies on mod_plsql. There’s a 40 Gb database which needs to be exported, compressed, scp’d over the net, uncompressed and imported. This all takes a lot of time and has us hard against our time limits. (By the way – thanks, Oracle – we didn’t actually NEED an incremental export facility (girr!)).

So, in theory, because it’s been tested to destruction, scripted to the eyeballs, and then tested again, it should all go according to plan.

Enter Orange Stupid. Unless we have someone running interference during the migration, his interference is almost guaranteed to cause delays. Which will result in us having to abort the whole exercise or risk going bust.

Like I said: shitting bricks.

John

UNIX geek, wannabe cook, musician, book-lover, and all round good-guy.