samplesDB poem

Sample Poetry
by Jenny Paduan and Mike McCann

Conceived by Ross with R-gram 36,
The samples project, with a host of new tricks,
   Would send the rogue child VICKI out to sea,
   To bring samples and data back so easily.
With it we were to impose institutional mandates
On sample numbers, loans, and collecting event dates,
   And to dust off old samples from shelves and from crates;
   The scientists were asked to cooperate.

Rich was consulted, our database sage,
He didn't know then we'd do so much with FrontPage.
Jenny spoke for the users, having been there before,
Mike spoke in perl, VBScript, and more,
Holly related to Access, transect-SQL, and Sybase,
Paul's object was Java; no one knew SmallTalk anyways.

We started in January with a blank slate and lots to do.
Rich said, "Stick to requirements, any more will cost you."
   Tired of talking, Holly said, "Let's just do it,"
   And Mike got his laptop and in Access, he drew it.
With field names like:
     ParentSampleID, CollectionRefName, StorageLocationDescription, HazMat, and SeedConcept,
     KeywordLookupStatus, FrameGrabImageURL, SubsamplePosition, and AnalysisComment,
We now had our design,
The next step was to get our data on-line.

Jenny went to town with IDC and SQL,
Detail sections, select pages, and HTML,
Tested over and over again with sample 73,
And bogus subsamples, and lots of coffee.
The queries relied on IIS and ODBC on Rain,
All those file pairs were a chore to maintain!

The shipboard process to capture data was waiting,
All Mike had to do was write VIF2staging.
   And to get the data from UNIX to NT,
   All that was needed was write loadcoll.asp!
He harnessed the she-wolf, VICKI by name,
TapeTimeCode's her secret, but she's none too tame:
   If "sampled-by" wasn't annotated, or time was nines or zeros,
   His script would be helpless and the process would hose.
Scientists have to push the "S" button and Tag repeatedly,
Fred fixed VICKI's GUI to make VIFs automagically,
   Now we could merge nav, and display lists, and print,
   If only the pilots would save VICKI's dot INT!

From concepts we needed keywords like "squid" and "gobs-of-goo"
To describe animals and rocks, and their parents, too.
Holly learned Java, DBAnywhere, and programs like that
To write the routine called "UpdateAllSampleKeywords.bat"
The keywords all come from the VIMS knowledge base,
With Java they get exploded but are all lower case.

Next came the migrations, and Holly and Dan's cleanup from Hell,
We moved from Rain to Cyclone, and from Access to MS SQL,
Migrate_import was another one, for historical creatures;
Over and over we quoted Microsoft: "It's not a bug it's a feature!"

Time from pl_logger, frame-grabs from Ariel and Lepas,
Keywords from VIMS, vifs to Calypso, CTD from Sybase,
Nav from Lobos and Barnacle, queries to Cyclone, and thanks to NT,
We give quite a workout to Samba, ftp, and ODBC.
Jenny put these details into one huge document,
With schemas, source-code, and developer's comments.

Next year samplesDB's enhancing with GIS and more,
With data it's expanding, and we're proud to the core.
What was first envisioned by Ross is now reality,
We have systems to track samples from their sources in the sea!

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