03/12/00: Dr. Strangechat, Part TWO!
by Gline

PART TWO: To Protect And To Serve… Wooly Bully And The Equal To SQL… Live And Sleazy

September 11.

Two and a half solid days of testing encouraged us to start running the site in a limited beta-test form. We now had separate rooms, a rudimentary security system, and a few other choice goodies that made the system less ugly. But make no mistake: it was still as ugly as the rusted undercarriage of a '57 DeSoto.

And when we fired it up for semi-public testing, we found some… problems. Posts were vanishing. People were hanging up on sends. At first I blamed the network, but a quick check of the network load showed that the line wasn't even close to saturated.

Some more quick research, however, confirmed my worst fears.

The Microsoft Jet database engine, which I'd been using thus far to support the whole enterprise, wasn't designed to support more than a couple of concurrent connections. In fact, it was only really intended for one user at a time. For real multi-user applications, I was going to have to take a big leap: SQL Server.

I had dealt with SQL Server 7.0 before, although only minimally. And the tales I'd heard about it courtesy of my co-worker the database administrator reminded me of all the horrid things that the kinds in high school would whisper about the Big Silent Thug who'd recently joined their class: He hit a teacher! Beat up a cop! Killed his mother! Etc., etc. Bad cess flying everywhere.

Yes, SQL Server was the nine-hundred-pound database gorilla in my mist, and I was stuck in the jungle without a gun.

But realistically speaking, I didn't have much of a choice. SQL Server 7.0 was readily available, it was the right tool for the job, and it was a product that I had at least some experience with. As Ripley had said in Aliens: "It's the only way to be sure." And since I was NOT about to nuke the site from orbit… this was what had to happen.

So I cracked the books and began to read.

September 12

Saturday night I sat down and re-planned my setup. Everything up until then had been concentrated on one box. To make things process more efficiently, I set up SQL on one server – the big backend machine with the mofo RAID array – and put the web server up front on another machine. Each machine had 128MB of RAM and plenty of disk space; they would be devoted to their tasks and not step on each other's toes.

In went SQL Server. And those rumors about the big evil kid having strangled dogs with their own intestines melted right away. It was easy. Getting the database moved over to SQL Server and up and running took less than an hour's time, total. Most of my fears centered around how hard it would be to translate data, but SQL Server has some very nice built-in tools for migrating data in just about any format or from any repository you could think of.

I fired up the web server and had friends come on over and hammer on it. They loved it. Couldn't get enough of it. Nothing was getting lost, and the server was responding in jig time, too.

Granted, not everything was working perfectly. Por ejemplo, the database had no automatic maintenance cycle. Old messages had to be manually deleted each morning and the database compacted, or I would rapidly turn my RAID array into Granny’s attic, loaded with all the most useless junk. I could live with doing that for a bit – it just needed to work, now.

And with three days left to go...

September 13

Live testing for remote users started on the 13th. Having twenty to thirty people on at once helped quickly flatten a number of significant bugs, including stuff with the private-message system (I could have saved myself a lot of time by not including it from the beginning!) and the way messages were refreshed. I also wrote the rudiments of the HTML-stripping code, which would allow people to use some but not all HTML tags to spruce up their posts.

That’s when I started getting the emails and the AIM messages. Not just from friends, but from people I barely knew. And they weren’t bug reports (although I got my fair share of those) – they were thank yous. People who with the impending death of WBS were downright distraught, and were just amazed that I’d managed to come this far in only a few days.

It had been a long time, if ever, since random strangers had thanked me for anything.

Something else came to mind. I had, almost without realizing it, fulfilled a long-standing dream of mine. Ever since my first exposure to RPGs on-line – from the RPGAMES "SIG" on CompuServe to WBS – I had dreamed about creating a similar system. I didn't know how I was going to do it or what form it would take – I just knew that I wanted to do something.

That night, we decided it was time to go live. At long last.

*Exciting music* Tune in next month, for the next chapter in Gline's ongoing saga of Future Past!