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

info@sundialservices.com (Sundial Services) wrote: >I cordially suggest that perhaps we should begin by defining and exploring >what we are talking about. For example, you appear to take for granted that >there -is- a "year 2000 bug," when in fact all of the databases whose groups >you posted to (I believe) contain intrinsic support for date/time values with >no limitation as to century. > >As a matter of fact, the -only- systems that could truly be affected by a >digit inaccuracy would be those few COBOL systems whose designers were so >short-sighted to code dates with two digits. Dates were, and are, such a >problem that all of the shops I know of not only wrote four-digit dates to >begin with, but wrote a large boatload of Assembler routines specifically to >handle dates. When databases supported dates and times better, we all >breathed a sigh of relief. That was, like, in the 1970's... :-/ Obviously you worked with some very sophisticated COBOL shops in the '70s, because what you describe is not at all as common as you describe. 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... -JJ Jeffrey Jacobs & Associates Oracle Designer/2000 Consulting & Training 951-2 Old Country Road, Suite 119, Belmont, CA 94002 Voice: 415-571-7092, FAX: 800-665-1379 CompuServe: 76702,456 Internet: 76702.456@compuserve.com