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Comment by z3t4 | Hacker News Reader

The interesting question is why the ODBC driver needed to be updated and why it was such a hurry. Probably because he/she wanted to see if it worked before business opening... And when he/she was not allow to do that maintenance on off hours, then he/she tested it on a less important internal system. The thing with ODBC drivers is that they deal with things like bigin support, which cover edge cases that you only see in production.

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ODBC was not used anywhere prior to this point. The company had its own hardened transports.

The frontend systems, taken as a whole, amounted to a bitchin’ botnet. They’d destroy ordinary services without even working up a sweat.

Using the right mechanisms for comms between them was in everyone’s best interest.

Odbc/SQL newb. I know what begin does, but I don't know why you'd only see it in prod. Surely you should test the same codepaths in staging that you plan to execute in prod?

Generally speaking from experience, most non-production facing testing does not accurately reflect what is actually happening in production in terms of actual queries run and volume of it.

A codepath which is perfectly fine in testing/staging could kneel over immediately against a production workload,

"Quantity has a quality all its own."

- Someone (I heard it attributed to Napoleon, but have seen it attributed to others)

In this case, it's very true -- workloads are really difficult to properly test with respect to production load. A code path that works well in one test can easily buckle under the pressure of a production workload. Stress testing is hard.

That's all well and good, but begin is pretty basic? Like, that's how you do transactions in SQL, right? We're not talking about a codepath that's working in testing and falling over in production. The person I responded to was suggesting a codepath that's not even tested in testing, and I was hoping to understand why begin would be such a codepath.

I could imagine some contrived situation where begin could make something fall over in production... Something something rollback logs.

I meant biginT, for example the prod might have over two billion of something, where local dev have not.

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