Maybe this subject should be OT?
True story (for real - it happened yesterday on leap day):

Our commercial application from a 3rd party who will be nameless (and who
doesn't offer MPE applications) running on Oracle on our HP 9000 yesterday
a transaction of data in the AR module on leap day.

The Bursar's office called me yesterday to report that a receipt number
was generated when a payment was entered, but wouldn't print. Then upon
investigation, they couldn't retrieve the record of the transaction on the
student's account. The cashier must have clicked SAVE, since that is what
triggers the receipt number being generated.  *If* the user had not
clicked on SAVE, there would have been no receipt number, but they had the
number and the next transaction entered used the next number.  I checked
all the rows in the apporpriate transaction table and couldn't find the
missing receipt, but the earlier and later ones were all there.

About 15 months ago we (and others) had reported a bug to this vendor that
it lost data during a transaction after generating and printing the
receipt (under certain conditions and keystokes).  They "fixed" this bug
sometime last year and we installed the patches (and many more since).  I
just realized that they must have fixed the wrong "bug", since now it
won't print the receipt, so you can no longer "prove" the data was entered
properly, then lost.:-) [I have to laugh - it hurts too much to cry - at
least I didn't recommend this vendor.]

BTW, this application is written in Oracle Forms, designer version 1.3.2,
with a *lot* of heavy pl/sql, and runs on Windows.  The Oracle server is
7.3.4.2.

The kicker: the Bursar's office staff blamed the lost data on leap day.

Richard

PS - I did check to make sure that the other transactions they entered
yesterday had the proper date - and they appeared to be fine.

--
Richard L Gambrell, Chair of Mocs Express Process Team
Database Administrator and
Consultant to Computing Services at UTC

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