On 3 May 2013, at 4:03am, Igor Korot <ikoro...@gmail.com> wrote:

> How do people prove to their customers that no matter what

As others have commented, this is too vague.  Many disasters will destroy the 
hardware the data is stored on.  They need to integrate what the software does 
for recovery with their own recovery precautions like offsite backup, live 
duplication, etc..

> the software
> will either finish gracefully or will not break, crash or anything to that
> matter?

This was years ago, and not working with SQL but with a far earlier and more 
primitive DBMS.  But I once did a demo for a customer where I had the database 
on an external 40Meg hard disk, and I let the manager in the meeting pull the 
external drive cable out while the program was updating a record, and later 
turn off the power to the computer while doing an end-of-month update.

Both times, when restarted the software detected the problem, recovered the 
last usable dataaset, and continued.  The customer was suitably impressed and 
continued with purchase negotiations.

Technically, the demo did not demonstrate what the customer thought it did.  
There was no way to do that that wouldn't have taken up a 10 hour meeting and 
involved lots of technical discussion, which was not appropriate with this 
customer.  Our software did handle most of these situations correctly, but 
there was no way to walk a non-technical customer negotiator through how it did 
it.  They would have felt embarrassed because they didn't understand the 
explanation and that's not a good way to run a meeting.

Simon.
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