My poor colleague (martyr) is trying to debug a production issue with some system generated emails today. If I can get the facts straight, the chain of calls goes:
- ASP "Classic" page calling into a...
- Stored Procedure that calls...
- Another Stored Procedure that calls...
- A third Stored Procedure that calls...
- An external COM object via DCOM (!) that posts...
- Information to a different web page to create and send the email
Of course, the auditing is lacking and all exception handling is done by the stored procedures. Once again, stored procedure abuse is a very serious problem. If you really think that T-SQL or PL/SQL is suitable for anything but CRUD or set-based logic, seek professional help immediately.
On a serious note, if you're building a system that generates emails that need to be reliable, I would strongly suggest creating a full audit trail of the email messages sent with an easy way to replay the email messages if you have to. Your support folks will thank you later.
I'm *this* close to deleting The Daily WTF from RSS Bandit because I think it verges on mean spiritness occasionally, but they always save the day with a post like Integration Nation that's good for a laugh. I showed it to my colleague today just to let him know that it could be worse. He didn't seem to feel any better though.