This could go either way

This past weekend was fairly full, between a major shopping trip on Saturday dedicated to both replacing the recently departed couch and filling some other gaps around the house, and Sunday's Halloween festivities which will no doubt merit their own post later this week. But now it is Monday morning and I find myself at work with something of a situation I need to handle.

There's been an ongoing situation I've been dealing with, or at least trying to stay on top of, for the past couple of months. Basically the facility that hosts one of the web applications my team uses wanted to move it to another server, so they copied it back in July and had me test it to make sure they got everything. While I was doing that testing, people were still using the original and adding to it in the normal course of things, and of course anything added from that point on wasn't part of the new copy. Then, in a sequence of events I'm still not entirely clear on, the old server was taken offline, and we were told to start using the new server, which had never been resynchronized, and by then the person who had been my main point of contact was gone (quit or reassigned or something, no one was terribly forthcoming). So there were a couple of months of lost data that we needed recovered, if possible, and there was not much I could do about it personally except ask real nice, but sometimes that's what my job comes down to - liaison stuff in the form of submitting repeated requests for technical services and status updates thereon from the people who actually have access and permission to do such things.

So I've been doing that and this morning I came in and found an email from Friday saying that they had recovered the old data and restored it ... sort of. They put it in a new separate database rather than the main one, which makes the data slightly more accessible to me than it was before, but really only in the theoretical sense. It's a relief because it no longer only exists on an old retired box that might be melted down as scrap metal any day now. But I'm also still waiting on the IT help desk to install the software I would need to be able to work directly on those databases myself. (If this sounds eerily familiar, it should - I keep requesting this software, getting it eventually, then finding out it's obsolete because the server farms have upgraded to systems my software is no longer compatible with, so I have to request the latest version - this is pretty much constant background noise for my job for the past year.)

Anyway, looks like I'll be spending much of today trying to figure out if there's any way, given the limited tools in my arsenal, I can work with what I've now got. OR if I can create a big enough fuss to get my new software installed immediately. OR if I need to punt back to the server team and basically say “I know you think you’ve solved my problem, but you really haven’t.” Should be a rollicking way to start off a new work week/month. I’ll try to get back to the more fun blog topics tomorrow.