Here's a tip for any budding team leads out there: don't believe vendors. If it doesn't work now, assume it never will. I'm not going to go into specifics as publicly flaming a party rarely improves the relationship. Let's just say that if a certain piece of vendor-supplied software actually did what the vendor claimed then the project that I've been leading for the last four months would be the most successful project of my fairly long and fairly successful career.
As said software does not live up to the vendor claims, I'm going to have to do some apologizing and lay out a whole bunch of contingency plans for getting this mess into production. Kinda sucks.
The part that cheeses me off the most is that I did see it coming. We did a proof of concept project last year and I had some real misgivings about the product. The shortcomings were real, but I let myself be convinced that either the vendor would fix it or we could work around it. They didn't, we still can, but it's going to be awfully hard to do that and get into production by March.
So, the most likely path is that we swap out that piece of vaporware for something that actually works and go to prod in April.
It's not that big of a deal. The project is still a firm success. At tomorrow's demo we will extract, load, and transform a 20-million row batch in about six minutes. On the current production system, that takes 45. And, we haven't even tuned it yet. When we really turn it loose on big loads (200-million plus) that take full advantage of the horizontal scaling, 50-100 times faster is a reasonable expectation. It just sucks that the presentation layer is so flakey. If that was tight, this would have been a huge win. Now it's just another step towards improving things.
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