June 18, 2009

Waahhh.....I skipped the blog for almost 4-5 months and back just to tell my day today. Today is one of the most memorable days in my first internship experience. The most satisfying as well pressurizing day. I started out quite nice in the morning. Tried to go earlier. Got a friend to chat with in bus. Arrived in Yio Chu Kang MRT just in time to poo in the MRT's toilet there (which then made me came late to work). Caught 70 just in time. Had quite a smooth noon. Thinking about going back earlier to research and decide on the macbook pro choices. But just when everything was about to end nicely, I clicked my mouse twice to slip into the worst case scenario in my job i.e. DROPPING DATABASE. Yeah, just a two-step two-fingers gesture and that would end you up in a biggest disaster ever in database-related job. I dropped 'master_outbound' database. One database only but from the name there we can deduce already that it is quite an enormous database. Easy to come, easy to go. The old proverb simply does not match with my experience. A two-step dropping process ended up in tedious and complicated recovering procedure. First I had to copy a similar database (new_outbound_delivery) and renamed it to 'master_outbound' (takes about 15 mins.) then I had to add two columns there (char_wtperunit and tonnage) which takes about 5-10 mins. Then I had my friend re populate both columns and re-check the data for duplicates and discrepancies. Next I had my other colleague to pull out a number of files from FTP which would be used to add the missing data to the database. After all data was populated, the quality assurance process came (done by the same colleague who pull out the files from FTP). The whole process took the 5 of us to leave office at around 9.30pm. Yeah the 5 of us. I was quite happy that my friends in fact were so tolerant that they were willing to stay late to help me to repopulate the database. I guess trouble has its own good side i.e. it strengthen the bond between us employees(?).  I went home by taxi. Very happy bcoz my supervisor said that the taxi will be compensated by company. In taxi I felt the most satisfaction mood I've ever had in my internship. Taxi fare was not as expensive as I thought it would be. I expected 15++ while it ended up as 12.60.