Publishing blog statistics horror story
I received an email from someone at Microsoft this morning about the availability of the Excel spreadsheet for internal Microsoft blogger December hit statistics. Last month I had written a program to show MS Bloggers hit statistics.
So I ran the program including the new December XL file on my test machine, tested it from a few web browser instances, saw that it all worked, then copied the PRG, DBFs to the production server. I just did a simple test on the production server, then sent an email to the MS Bloggers alias announcing the stats through December were available.
Within a few minutes, there were dozens of hits from around the world (note: to run this program you must be on the internal Microsoft corp net).
On a whim, I clicked on one of the generated links, and to my horror, I saw that only a few records of data were showing! The main page showing aggregated stats for all MS Bloggers worked fine, but the detailed month by month pages were missing many months.
I examined the suspect SQL Select statement to see what could be wrong:
SELECT LEFT(CMONTH(bs.date),3)+" 2005" as Month, ;
TRANSFORM(rss,cPict) as Rss,;
TRANSFORM(web,cPict) as Web,;
TRANSFORM(total,cPict) as Total,;
TRANSFORM(rss/web,"99,999.99") as Ratio,;
TRANSFORM(pos,"9999")+"/"+TRANSFORM(bm.cnt,cPict)+" = %"+TRANSFORM(INT(100*pos/bm.cnt)) as Position, ;
IIF(bs.btype='M',"MSDN","Technet") as MSDNTech;
FROM blogstats bs INNER JOIN blogsum bm ON bs.btype+DTOC(bs.date,1) =bm.btype+DTOC(bm.date,1);
WHERE blog == cBlogName ORDER BY MSDNTech,bs.date INTO CURSOR foo
Because a few records were missing my first thought was that the INNER JOIN wasn’t working right. Perhaps I had upper/lower case join condition mismatch? How about the date format? Did SET ENGINEBEHAVIOR make a difference?
What version of VFP was running on each machine? Did I have an interim beta build running? I tried another machine, and it reproduced the problem.
Finally, I realized that when I copied the main DBF, I had neglected to copy the associated index file, so VFP’s Rushmore was using an incomplete index for the SQL statement.
See also What is an index anyway?
- Anonymous
January 05, 2006
It's good to see I'm not the only one that's made that mistake. - Anonymous
January 05, 2006
if someone had added a timestamp of synchronism in the dbf and cdx headers,
this horror would not be happened. - Anonymous
January 07, 2006
As long as no lives were lost... <s>
If you aren't making mistakes, you're not doing enough.