Kathy,
I would also say welcome to the world of consultants. In the last 15 years
of working with these "beltway bandits" I have seen both good and bad. To get a
good outcome the statement of work (SOW) needs to be VERY specific as to what
they are to do, how they document it, who and when they coordinate with, etc...
One item that is needed is a section on how they will hand off the project. Now
I know you had no hand in doing this since your apparently new at the company,
but if damanagement wrote a poor SOW your stuck, and in my experience the
consultants will keep as much of what they do to themselves as they possibly
can. That way when things break you have to call them back, at extra $$$, to
fix and/or improve things.
As an example, one project I worked on for the USAF which had a really bad
SOW was completed by the contractor at the 11th hour 59th minute by e-mailing
the source code to us overnight. It just made the cut-off. The code, written
in Pro*C, came in as 80 column text with no real formatting. It would not
precompile never mind compile. I spent 2 weeks reformatting the code and then
trying to map out what the contractor had done. It was a nightmare as the
variable names used were celestial (sun, moon, earth, etc...). In the end one
other programmer & I re-wrote the code in a week and a half (boy where those
some LONG nights)directly from the specs. Now one would expect the government
to extract it's 'pound of flesh' from the contractor, but NO way, they had meet
the SOW, minimally. Therefore, I'd suggest that you get with your damanagement
and have a head-to-head with the contractor, else you may find yourself in a
pickle.
Dick Goulet
____________________Reply Separator____________________
Author: Kathy Duret <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 7/18/2001 3:01 PM
First some background
We are running on Unix 8.1.6 with 11i Apps. I know very little about Oracle
Apps and I am the first DBA hired in house who has walked into several projects
mid streams that consultants are working on and they continue to exclude me from
design meeting and I get little or no information about the project.
A consulting group is customizing 11i Apps. Part of this involves an EDI
application that will take in files load them into staging tables that then will
be loaded into the appropriate 11i App table. There are various Oracle and
Crystal Reports that will be extracting information from these tables as well.
Why use both... go figure... they are using Crystal for some reports and Oracle
Reports for others. Just like some of the screens are being done in Forms and
some done in ASP.
These custom EDI app tables have 10 attribute columns defined as varchar2(100)
in the middle of the table. These are extra columns to that may be used in the
future for what ever reason. I have asked these be removed and real column
names and data types be added as needed. They refuse saying they will have to
redesign the forms they have created to use with these tables. Isn't is
reasonable that the Forms should also reflect real column names not Attribute
1...10? Isn't it better to add columns to tables as I need them with an
appropriate name and data type? At the very least I asked that they put these
columns at the end of the table. They have agreed to this.
They are also using a lot of sequences for Primary Keys instead of using columns
from the table that would make an intelligent primary key and would be unique.
They also have many columns as NUMBER that could be defined as NUMBER(3) or
NUMBER(4). Is there any pros or cons to using NUMBER without defining a data
length? That is besides the obvious that NUMBER you don't have to worry about
losing precision data precision.
Also they use a lot of char(1) in defining what they think will only be one
character fields. I was under the impression that it was better to use
varchar2(1)? Any comments... This is probably a trivial issue but I would like
to know people's opinions.
I am just a bit brain dead from arguing with them anyway about using a
consistence naming convention, including me on the database design, etc. Even
with renaming a column I get "We are on a tight schedule and this would put us
behind". Or this is how Oracle Apps works. My point is that Oracle Apps as a
generic product and this EDI application shouldn't be made generic but specific
to our company needs. That is not putting in this Attribute fields into all the
EDI tables, using intelligent keys not sequence numbers, defining the data
length of the NUMBER Fields.
I am really worried about performance since I will have to maintain this in
January after they are long gone.
Any help or suggestions would be appreciated. Any good books to get me quickly
up to speed on how to tune Oracle Apps?
Thanks very much.....
Kathy
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