Temporary

One of the things I've learned being a sysadmin is that there's no such thing as a "temporary solution", if you're presented with one or thought about one yourself first ask yourself how do you feel about this solution becoming permanent, because it's here to stay.

Reasons for temporary solutions becoming permanent are numerous, but I think most of them come down to the (reasonable) claim that it's better to turn efforts to something that needs fixing than to something that already works. Many times the burden of maintaining such a temporary solution falls on the sysadmin so one else sees how bad it really is and sometimes it's just more efficient (in the immediate time frame) to accept this burden than to solve the issue once and for all.

One example I always fall back to when I have an argument about a temporary solution is the example of the email sending mechanism we use in our Oracle Applications system:

Our basic solution for sending email is based on an EBS alert that monitors a table we insert data into when we want the system to send an email to someone. An important detail: an EBS alert is simply a database trigger that is wrapped with a test that the table was updated by APPS - the EBS administrative user.

Now, several years ago we've started using ApEx as a platform for developing applications over our EBS. The catch - ApEx applications don't use the APPS user so they can't send email the way we used to, at least not without modification to our mechanism. "Luckily", ApEx has it's own email sending mechanism so we decided to use it as a temporary solution. That was about three years ago.

At this point you probably can ask me "well, who cares?", and I'll probably answer "well, I do". I do, because when we upgraded our mail server to Exchange 2007 it didn't really like the Hebrew encoding ApEx was using and decided not to display it properly. So after a day or two in which emails just weren't sent from the affected ApEx applications we had to devise a solution I'm not sure anyone will know about when the Exchange server will be upgraded to 2010.

It's a shame because the solution to this is issue was designed a long time ago, the ApEx mechanism causes application pages to hang while mail is being sent, but still - why fix something that isn't broken?

Beware of temporary solutions.