2015-06-19

Midsummer eve

Today it’s midsummer eve, it’s almost a sacred holiday in Sweden. We who live in Stockholm go out into the archipelago in the Baltic outside the town. Stockholm is almost empty, and the sun is up the entire days night.This year is different, the weather is unusually bad, rain rain dark clouds making it looks more like a day in the fall. For the first time in many years I’m alone in the city. I’m happy not being out in the islands this year.



Last year I rebuild the Linux system in the ETL server of the Data Warehouse on midsummer eve morning in an attempt to connect ODBC to Iseries DB2 systems. In the middle of this my siblings called me and told me they were waiting on me going out to the countryside. I stopped my rebuilding sure my tinkering could not possibly intervene with the normal operations of the ETL server. Of course it did, it killed all ETL jobs for the entire holiday. The guys responsible for the Data Warehouse had to work two days repair the damages, and they made me promise never to do ANYTHING  next midsummer eve or ever any midsummer eve after.

2015-06-18

The Funnel

The Funnel a.k.a. Tratten (1976 - 2015-06-02)

The funnel a landing zone for program to program communication was conceived around 1976. This brilliant piece of software has served the company well for almost 40 years. It started it’s life as simple PDS store with a few simple API’s (store and get) later revamped into a full-fledged integration platform with a DB2 data store running. We were some that contributed to the funnel over the years, but there are three who deserves to be mentioned by name:
Ulf Nordin
Per-Erik Dahlberg

If some survivors can be assembled, we should have a funeral feast for the old workhorse.
 

P.S.
Year 2000 a project started to replace the Funnel, and the plug was pulled 2015-06-02, unfortunately not without some hassle. Some purchase order flows were still going via the funnel. Those are now ported to the new integration platform.