Re: Question: How will the Year 2000 bug impact your work?

Kim Schludecker wrote: > > Terry Pennington wrote: > > > > James Buss wrote: > > > > > > > >It has long been prophesied that the end of the world is going to occur in > > > > >1999, and therefore renders the question moot. :-)=) > > > > > > > Excellent point, Jeff. > > > > I can change my date fields back to two digit centuries again! :) > > > > > > Of course, I don't see what the big deal is about typing 19 in front of > > > all my dates. > > > > > > Jim. > > It's not that YOU have to type the '19' in front of dates, it's the > > users that whine about it. Two more characters per date and the next > > thing you know there's no time to gather 'round the water cooler and > > chat about the kiddies and kitties. > > > > But, I'm just a cynical crumudgeon who can't spell as you can see from > > this sentence. :)>. (new symbol for smiling while sporting beard) (and > > very small nose) (and no hair, which fits) > > > > Terry Pennington > > Didn't I learn at Progress school that you can set the century to start > at 1980 and end at 2079 or some such thing? Thereby eliminating four > digit years? Maybe, but that won't help everyone. Our database is the alumni/development database at UNC and we legitmately have dates spanning the period from about 1725 to the present (and continuing into the future) so there have always been places in our system where our users have had to enter the century along with dates. Fortunately for us, our dates have always been stored as 8 digits so we haven't had to make any file changes. The only thing we had to do was make room on screens and reports to display/enter the additional data. I would estimate it probably took us (2 full-time and 1 half-time programmers) less than a month all together to complete the necessary changes (and that was while continuing normal maintenance and some new development). It's going to be more of a problem for those who have to restructure files because they've stored dates as 6 digits. Still, overall, I think this problem has been far overblown by the media and alarmists in our own profession. It is a problem that has to be addressed. Fixing it is going to be tedious and more or less time consuming but not particularly difficult. In fact, it probably won't take all that much time if people will quit worrying about it and just do it. It's just another maintenance task and one that we have over 3 years to complete. BTW, the application that we just fixed consists of over 400 mainframe batch programs (Cobol II), a similar number of mainframe online programs and screens, a fairly major DSS client/server system, large IDMS and Sybase databases and numerous sub-systems and desktop apps. Three of us got it all converted in a month (note that the only file changes we had to make were to flat file extracts from the database, all dates were already stored with century). -- ================================================ Ray Porter Applications Analyst Programmer Administrative Information Services, UNC-CH Phone: 966-5878 email: lrp@email.adp.unc.edu dragon@email.unc.edu Home Page: http://www.adp.unc.edu/~lrp/