God's Ways of helping

I work on Oracle BI (OBIEE). I was working on the project called Portfolio management (PFM) along with MBR channels. Work was overwhelming, I was working late night and over weekends (something I never did all through my career till this point). Aug 29h 2008 was the deadline for me to deliver the reports on the PFM.
I received the data model on Aug 18. I plugged it into the existing data model. It worked. I decided that just few minutes of work is left and I can wind up on the weekend.

Weekend when I started working, I realized that the data model is wrong, I cannot sum the values!!!. And of the 6 reports that have to be completed two reports can't be created in OBIEE. On 25th Aug, I pinged the database team and asked them to give the right data model. Now they were busy and they could give me only by end of day. Now, I was getting scared. :-).

Database team was co-operative and by end of 25th Aug I got the data model on the development environment. I copied the repository file from the production server on to the development server, and then imported the data model. I created the joins and deployed on the development (dev) server, hoping it will work. I brought the UI up and when I tried to add the fields from the data model. It started throwing up errors. The error was straight; it said that tables were not found. I guess I was already worked up, I thought the problem was in the data model. So I went about doing umpteen numbers of trails and errors to fix the data model. It failed. I was at a loss.

Next day, while driving to office I kept thinking on how to bring up the system. I pinged the database team and requested them to look at it. But they were already overloaded. I kept on with my trail and error. At that point, my PFM manager Chandra pinged me. He asked me why was the development server was showing production data. Eureka!! It then hit me; the repository file was pointing to production database, while the new data model was in development environment. I hadn't changed the repository file to point to the development environment after I copied it from the production server. So I was getting the error. I replied to my manager saying he was great and he had helped me debug the problem. He was perplexed. Then I explained to him, I guess he had a good laugh.

Now, I changed the repository file to point to dev and Aaiye La!! It worked!! Phew!!

If my manager hadn't pinged me and asked me about data, I don't know how long I would have taken to debug the problem.

God's ways of helping are really unique.