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Wish me luck (please)

B

bczoom

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I've been tasked with installing a major upgrade to a very large (largest in its State) hospital computer system. Systems are Patient Accounting, Medical Records and Patient Management (registration). After several months of development, testing... we're turning it on this weekend.

My job in this initiative is to convert all the data as well as implement the system.

To give an idea of what my part encompasses.
I had to write over 20,000 lines of code (MVS JCL) to tell the computer exactly what I want it to do to install the system. MVS JCL is a 1960's era IBM computer language that's still so damn powerful it won't go away. 20,000 lines is the equivalent to a 400 page book. Not a word of it is in English. NOT 1 CHARACTER CAN BE WRONG.

They're turning their entire mainframe over to me to get it done. The benchmark I'm going for is to install the system and convert all their data in a matter of a few hours. In rough numbers, I'll put the computer through over 5,000,000,000,000 (5 trillion) instructions to make it happen. Again, no burps or hick-ups wanted.

There's a great team on this. As a group, we had to install tons of enhancements and regulatory changes to the application software which is in the millions of lines of code. They did the changes, I bundle and put them in.

So, here we go. A working weekend. Reminder to self. Entice mgmt. to not schedule such a project on a Superbowl weekend in the future.
 
You can write 20,000 line of code without an error, and you can't figure a way to delay the implementation for a week?
 
:wow:I aint even sure what you said , so I'll just wish you the best of luck BC , sounds like a nightmare to me to even be responsible for the task . Good luck . :unsure:
 
Just program "Packers Win" somewhere in those trillion bits of info so it pops up at random. hehe
 
Brian: they scheduled it for this weekend because they figure Sunday will have the least incoming requests for data processing going on. Everybody else will be busy watching the Steelers get handled by the Packers so you won't really miss much! Hope it goes smooth for you.:flowers:
 
Good luck Brian. What a project. I'm sure you have multiple backups for just in case scenerios, but once you are past the point of no return the backups are not the answer.

I still deal with JCL a little. 20k lines is insane. That is manipulating one hellofa lot of data. :eek:
 
Damn Brian... that's nuts!

as are the rest of the fools that have dreams of a Packers win....

Good luck!
 
Thanks y'all.
Yep, we've had a dry-run and I do have backups coded.
Unfortunately, the dry-run can't fully mimic production and the backups are untested so my SOP = Seat Of Pants.

PS. Muleman - We all know the Steelers are going to win. I've coded for it...
 
Zoom, prior to retiring, I had many weekend projects like you described. Most all came on holiday or long weekends because that gave us an extra day for the conversions, if needed.

I remember JCL very well as MVS mainframes were about all we had then. Very few servers and PCs.

It is always nerve wracking at the beginning of the conversion, but usually things worked out well. Over the years I had to call off a few upgrades, but thankfully they were few and far between.

Best of luck and let us know how everything went.

Bob
 
BUMP.

Thanks everyone!

Our production install went incredibly well. Those conversion jobs hummed so quickly that we had the conversions completed and software loaded faster then their normal monthly downtime window that occurs monthly in the same downtime period. Users didn't notice any downtime.

I'm currently converting some of their other areas (history & training regions). Training ran nicely, history is taking a looonnnnggg time as the files are 10x the size of their production environment.
 
bczoom said:
Thanks y'all.
Yep, we've had a dry-run and I do have backups coded.
Unfortunately, the dry-run can't fully mimic production and the backups are untested so my SOP = Seat Of Pants.

PS. Muleman - We all know the Steelers are going to win. I've coded for it...
Click to expand...
Rewrite the code!:whistling:
 
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