Tracking Down Data in a Database – Yikes!
Today I have spent most of the day tracking down some data in a massive Teradata database, and trying to relate it back to the data I needed so I could make the event stream cover this odd data as well as it covers the normal stuff. While I can understand the need for this, it's hard work because the field I'm getting in the incoming message is permalink, and it's an integer, and now I have to find what field this is in literally hundreds of tables in a massive, multi-TB Teradata install.
I was pretty sure that I had a good idea where to start looking, but I wasn't exactly sure, and true enough, I wasn't right on the money, but I was close. I then had hours ahead of me to get the right answer, and then build the SQL query that would return the rows I needed in a reasonable time-frame to build up the cache of data in redis that I was going to need.
Suffice it to say that it's not a lot of fun when you can't get folks to standardize on indexes or identifying codes in a system as large as this. But hey... it's done.