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

Jeff Jacobs wrote: > Even though the back-end databases should handle Y2000, there is *tons* of front > end code that has been written that might not handle it properly. > > And, despite Oracle and other RDBMS vendors succes, something like 80% of all > corporate data is *NOT* in an RDBMS, but are in various file format. > > There are many organizations, including major financial org's, that have > literally *lost* their source code. > > There are major systems written in older versions of Progress and Natural/ADABAS > that won't handle Y2000 properly. > > In the past 6 weeks, I've dealt with two clients where Y2000 will have a major > impact on their business. In one case, the company estimated that it would cost > $40-50M (million) to correct their legacy problems, with *no* increase or change > in functionality. In another situation, the system will simply stop working in > late 1998, at an incredibly large loss to the business. These are Fortune 1000 > companies with very large (and old) IS departments. > > Its pretty scary how many systems will be affected... 4GLs should handle Y2000 correctly, provided coders use internal dates which do not truncate the year to 2 digits. However, the -real- problem is with internal date routines, where in-house routines are used (mainly 3GLs). Most people know that every 4th year is a leap year except for centuries. Many do -not- know that centuries divisible by 4000 -are- leap years. Y2000 is a leap year! Consequently many routines will give, for example, days of the week which are one day out. Nico --------------------------------------------------------- Nicola Mody-Nikoloff nicolam@torque.co.nz