T-SQL Tuesday #107: Death March

This Month's T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Jeff Mlakar, and he has asked for us to tell the tale of a project that went horribly wrong.

This will be short, but it's one of my favorite stories of a project that wasn't totally thought through. I (thankfully) wasn't part of the team for this, but the way word spreads in IT, my group heard of this, and we were shaking our heads in disbelief very quickly.

Back in the day, I worked at a large organization with a very large IT staff. There were many systems on differing platforms, and a decent number of them were running Linux. One day we got word that a project had been started to create a custom file system for the organization. Apparently NONE of the many file systems available in Linux met our "extremely specialized" requirements, so we needed our own. Also (and this was really given as a reason for the project) "Google created their own file system, so we can do it too."

My comment to my team leader at the time was something like "Google has scale requirements beyond our imagination, and has hundreds of employees with Ph.D.'s in computer science and related fields who can address these problems. We don't."

I took a different job shortly thereafter, so I never got to experience the results of this project. But I don't believe there ever were any. I've kept in touch with former co-workers and none of them are aware of any custom file systems in use.

Thank you Jeff for hosting this month's T-SQL Tuesday! If you'd like to help out and host one, contact Steve Jones.