My primary function at work is making machines do the work of people. Over the past few years I have increased efficiency and lowered opportunity for human error by orders of magnitude by writing programs to do the things I and my coworkers would otherwise spend tedious hours clicking and typing and watching.
One particular process had eluded me though. Some times records have to be re-sent. Often times those record counts are in the millions and the gatekeeper system can only handle ~10k records per hour. This would lead to me staying up for days on end, watching a queue count email received every 30 minutes, and manually triggering resends based on the thresholds
Not any more! On Tuesday one of my service accounts was granted SELECT access to the Oracle database where the queue count resides. Yesterday I built a .NET application to query that database for relevant data and automatically trigger record pushes based on thresholds determined by the business. Today I used it to perform its duties.
And perform it has! It’s been resending records for six hours without a hiccup. This is a small batch, so only 12 hours of processing is expected. We even had an hour where queue count went above the threshold - due to regular data movement adding to the load, not because the system failed to perform as expected - and the system waited patiently until the queue was happy and continued on its merry way.
The best part? No actual testing was performed before execution today. I had no clue if it was going to function and here it is, functioning flawlessly. I like what I do.