had that happen at Schering Plough a zillion years ago. New hire in IT noticed our version of ODBC was two versions old. So, he set an update push to all the computers to update the ODBC to the latest version. Newer is always better am I right?
So 10s of thousands of computers and laptops all over the world Monday morning received a push update of the database connectivity shim.
And ALL KINDS of systems go down. Why?
Because most everything interacting with databases were custom-built by people like me who handled the needs of small departments of 20-200 people and were intimately tied to such things as “current version of ODBC” (because it’s NEVER BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE no matter how much they say it is. I’m sure they try but it’s impossible to get it all right because you don’t have every use case scenario).
Needless to say, he was fired. The mess took all week to clean up as a new push of the older version had to go out, but meanwhile various interconnected systems had taken advantage or changed after the upgraded version was put in and each department had to get their own local whiz-kids to troubleshoot their needs.
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