COLLEEN ROBLEDO Web Developer | Librarian | Researcher | Genealogist

While doing further development work today on the customer service module for our Grails-based web site administration tool, I encountered hibernate object retrieval failure exceptions when trying to access the Show views for some of our users. The console indicated these exceptions are due to rows referencing non-existent identifiers, or foreign keys.

Our redesigned web site launched late last night, which includes an entirely new inverted e-commerce application.

Our original site was built upon a hybrid e-commerce framework (part in-house Java, and part open source PHP-based osCommerce), implemented purely for expediency's sake to make our holiday shopping season 2007 launch date. However, this temporary solution quickly proved inflexible and difficult to maintain.

I've spent most of this past month at work investigating and rectifying some of the challenges encountered during our big database migration this year.

We had to launch the initial site so fast that its database architecture did not ever really meet our business needs, or satisfy my personal and professional data integrity standards. Now that the site refactoring and Grails conversion has been finished, I can finally tackle some much needed database cleanup issues.

Yes, that's me now... the SQL Queen!

I pretty much live, breath, eat, and sleep in SQL code now, thanks to the web developer job.