Posts from June 2007

The Siebel 7.8 data model supports different industry applications (finance and banking, pharmaceutical, sales, telecommunications, energy, media, motor, public sector, retail) and contains 3,920 tables and even more indexes.

The results are just in from a Friday afternoon poll to find the most popular Siebel table:

• S_ACCELERATOR - invaluable in performance tuning. 'Oh well - there's nothing for it. Now we are simply going to have to load S_ACCELERATOR'.
• S_CLUSTER_TNT - images of cluster bombs and high explosives but supposedly related to 'Hospitality'.
• S_AUDIT_ITEM - typically will contain 155 million records of historic audit data dating back to 2003. No-one knows why this data is being collected let alone using it.
• S_DOCK_INITM_43 - Crazy name, crazy table. Docking table for Remote.
• S_CL_PTCL_LSXM - A real tongue twister related to clinical protocols.

And finally...

• S_DISEASE - the clear winner.

Two weeks ago, I was working in the beautiful city of Oslo. After a couple of hours, the client finally couldnt take any more of my tedious hand-waving and badly drawn architecture diagrams so he suggested we had a five minute coffee break.

In the immaculate pine kitchen, my eyes were drawn to a notice in Norwegian affixed to the kitchen cupboard. One of my hosts smiled and said 'I bet you don't know what that says'.

Quick as a flash, I replied 'Oh I bet you a pint of expensive beer that I do.'

'Please, please wash up your plates and mugs. Your mother doesn't work here'

'God that is absolutely amazing. Why didn't you say you spoke Norwegian ?'

In a similar vein, Andrew Sherman brings my attention to a marvellous blog devoted to passive-aggressive notices posted in office kitchens, officious post-its stuck on fridge doors and not-so-polite notices hanging on toilet walls from all around the world.

If only I'd known, I would have taken a photo of this British entry.