The Daily WTF

Caleb (previously) continues to work for a vehicle finance company. Most recnetly, he was working on a data ingestion application. Its job was to pull in a big ol’ pile of CSVs from a mix of vendors and customers and feed it into a central database to keep things up to date.

“Application”, however, is misleading. In reality, it was a suite of Access databases scattered around various network shares. Each represented a custom data loading pathway for a kind of data. It wasn’t true that each was isolated from every other- frequently, the data flow would be “Open database fileserverprocessingvendor01.mdb, use the form to load the CSV file, then open fileserverprocessingprocess01.mdb, but only AFTER you’ve deleted the CSV file.”

Caleb’s job was “easy”: trawl through this thicket and figure out which parts handled just vehicle model information, sourced from vehicle manufacturers. Figure out what it did, and then reimplement

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