Databases suck

So far this week I have spent too much time at work and not enough with tea_cantata. We have been preparing for a software evaluation - something like a demo, but where the customer can get hands-on with the software - today. The software in question is a completely new version of our most popular product on top of a completely new version of our application server, the latter of which I've been working on for the past year. Suffice to say that neither is feature-complete or stable and the past few weeks (for one of which I was away, thankfully) have involved added the most important of the missing features and fixing the most egregious bugs. This triage culminated in all-night testing and hacking last night, though I was able to duck out at 3:30.

Along the way, my hatred for database vendors with offices in Reading and whose names begin with M and O have only grown. The database layer I wrote some time ago but which only got severely tested recently is now littered with workarounds for the foibles and outright bugs in their software.