Sigh of Relief!

Konnichiwa peoplez,

Some very good news this week. Our client has finally come out of his disillusioned coma and agreed to alter the structure of their existing crappy database. Phew! Finally, we can utter a sigh of relief. Here’s how it went down. Prior to the meeting on Friday, Tarindra and Aaron were busy coming up with a good, understandable DSD (Data Structure Diagram) to show the client with regards to the proposed system (with the assistance received by Jake and David on Thursday). This was a well spent 8 hours in total, because as I’m about to tell you, it turned the tables around 180 degrees in our favour.

Once at the meeting, Aaron gave this DSD to Andrew (the technical fellah a.k.a “the engineering dude” a.k.a “the guy who was so reluctant to break-down the current data structure and AssetList table containing 25 attributes!”), and explained to him exactly how we propose to break down the AssetList table and make their lives a lot easier. My nervousness climaxed at this point and as soon as Andrew murmured “umm…..yea OK”, the anxiety slowly went downhill from here, because I knew Aaron was doing a good job convincing him. I believe one of the major reasons why Andrew agreed with us this time was the fact that he could visually see right in front of him a detailed diagram of what the database will look like after being modified. Looking at this and thinking of how it will be much more efficient definitely must have made him reconsider our proposal. Also, I think we should have done this at last week’s meeting (instead of waiting till this week), because if we had shown him a diagram (rather than just explaining it verbally last week), he may have agreed to it then as well….who knows!

Some minor modifications to our design were also made at the meeting, such as changing the relationships between certain data structures and getting rid of a few entities in our ERD (Entity Relationship Diagram). Other than that, the clients also supported us providing them with a familiar view to manipulate data. This way, a query can be set up to call the relevant attributes from the corresponding tables to be shown on a view resembling what the client is already used to working with, even though the underlying internal schema of the database would have changed.

Now we can properly finish off the functional specification since we now have a better understanding of what the client expects from us and can document it with confidence. This whole issue with the clients has affected the schedule of delivering our functional specification document due to the fact that we weren’t sure of the proposed system’s functionality and structure. Also, now remains the task of normalizing attributes and we still need the client’s approval to normalize certain attributes of some tables. This will most likely be obtained by next week, but won’t affect the functional specification in any way.

The meeting went for an hour and fifteen minutes. On the way home, everyone was relieved! Aaron was like “I’m so happy I’m gonna go home and get pissed tonite”. Tar was like “I can’t go out these days, mum’s been telling me I been going out too much and want me to stay home more!” And I was like “Damn I need to go home and blog!” See how much I go through just to keep you guys entertained???

Anyways, that’s it for now. At the end of the day, it was a good result and everyone’s satisfied. (Even the database! It must be going ‘yay, I have more room to spread my arms and legs around a bit more!’)…lol….I know…it’s very lame homour…but I cant help it!!! :)

Sayoonara peeps.