LOC - Malai

First, let me thank Archana for the invite. Though my name figured first in the invitees list, it took a bit long to send the story. Well…I confess….I was little preoccupied and I forgot that I should send the story. Yesterday it suddenly struck me that I need to send mine. Sorry for the delay Archana.
2006 April. It was quite hot and humid here at S’pore. We had scheduled a delivery for the client. It was a db Analyser tool for a database called jBase. We had spent more than 3 months on that. After UAT, it was scheduled for production release on a friday night. Immediately after the release, we had to run the tool. Our estimation was it would take around 20 hrs. After that we had to handover the system to operations who had to run the overnight batch which will take another 8 hrs. We thought safely we can complete everything by Saturday evening.
We were a 3 member team. So I had asked Malai to come for the first 8-9 hrs and Kandha can continue after that. I decided to stay thru as I wanted to see the thing go smoothly. As scheduled, Malai and myself were there at Friday midnight. After db backup and other usual procedures, the system was handed over to us and we started off. Things were going with no hiccups for the first session. Malai went home by around 9am and Kandha resumed. The analyser was running like a obedient boy and I asked Kandha to leave by around 6pm. I thought I can manage another 2 hours and I can go have a good sleep. But to my dismay, the performance dropped drastically and it was taking unusually long to analyse even smaller tables. The recalculated time showed it might take another 9-10 hrs !! With help from the networking guys and batch operators, I was trying to get things back on rail. Mhmmmm….nothing worked out. The head of the Ops was sitting on my head to get back the system on time. Else he said, he is going to restore the backup and start. I was not ready for it.
10pm. Situation was getting worse every minute. I had no choice but to stop it. I tried my hands with code. In offline mode it was doing well. But in auto mode, it was again showing up its bad face. Even if I could fix it, I cant get it to production. 11:30pm. I was too tired staying awake for more than 22 hrs. I decided to call up Malai and run the thing manually and complete the rest. I explained him the situation and he said he will come soon. I asked him to go to the head office in the city and call me from there. But after about an hour and a half, to my astonishment, he reached the office where I was sitting, with all his luggages. When I called him, poor guy was shopping in a mall in the city and he had to leave to India next morning for his marriage. (I thought he was leaving the next week.) He went to the city office but the security system didn’t allow him as it was past midnight. He took a cab to home, packed his luggages and came. I had no words to thank him. Sunday 1am. We started the manual process and managed to complete by around 6am. We handed over the system to the operations team. Then I went with him to the airport and sent him off. I had a good sleep after that.
I was amazed at Malai’s dedication and commitment. Without his assistance on that day, it would have been a disaster. One, we would have been forced to withdraw the production release. Second, we would have started all over again if we had stopped the process. For us, it was a major release which we didnt want to miss at any cost. It was a real challenge to build a tool with umpteen features for a ‘pick’ database. It is such gems like Malai in Cognizant who make it happen.
With this, I would like to invite
Balasubramaniam, Shyamala (https://ch1blogs.cognizant.com/blogs/149685/)
A, Prem (https://ch1blogs.cognizant.com/blogs/104888/)
Many of my friends dont blog

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