You know, I think we worked for the same guy. This is a true story, and this type of situation happened on an almost daily basis for the year I worked there.

I'll keep the company out of it, but the application we were maintaining kept statistical data on cellular phone calls. We were inserting on average 100,000 rows of data per hour and summarizing them into some 50 or 60 reports generating an additional couple of million rows per hour. All of the individual detail records needed to be available, as well as any range of data that management asked for. And the raw data files had to be kept on line.

I come in one Tuesday morning to find a note from my boss: "Come see me right away about the database migration this afternoon."

Database migration? I haven't heard anything about a database migration. We had just finished migrating our MySQL database to a Sun E-4500 server that had been maxxed out in both processors and bandwidth. We had also moved from a couple of JBOD arrays to a nice EMC Clarrion array with around 2TB of space. We also had a processing teir (an E3500) that did a bunch of other work on the files, moving some of the really nasty data transformations off of the database server so it was snappier for queries.

"Tim," he said. "I promised this other department that they could have the 4500 because we didn't need the power." I gasped, noticing that "top" routinely reported utilization at .9 no matter what time of the day we ran it.

"Did we get the E10K," I asked, somehow maintaining my composure.

"No, I've got an Ultra-60 that we can migrate to. It's dual processor; should be pleanty of power. Oh, and the reports are running slowly. It's taking 20 minutes after the top of the hour before the engineers can look at their numbers. We need them available instantly."

"Not possible," I said. I knew that wouldn't matter, but I felt a moral obligation to say it. "You've just removed 90% of the processing power from the database server and you want me to make the application run faster?"

His reply: "That's what I pay you for. I tell you what to do, you do it. If it's not possible, you need to find a way to make it possible."

I went to my desk, fired off a letter to his boss explaining the situation. I then went into his office and said: "Hey, I've solved my problem!"

"Good deal! I knew you'd come up with a solution."

"Yep," I countered, heaving a sigh of relief. "I quit. It's your problem now."