Public Life affected by Database Corruption

Broken Chains in IDMS Database has affected the public life in Helsinki City and the impact is reported in Finnish Television as well as prominent Finnish Newspapers! Frontpage and full page coverage on "Helsingin Sanomat" says Computer Error stops the Social Payment System of Helsinki. From a technical viewpoint it is unclear what caused the error. It need not be a software bug, but a procedural error happened at the datacenter. IWDG is trying to get more information on the topic. Sample Page from Finnish Daily Helsingin Sanomat (18 Feb 98) follows:

Earlier Report on This

Broken Chains in CA-IDMS in the News!

Broken Chains in IDMS Database has affected the public life in Helsinki City and the impact is reported in Finnish Television as well as prominent Finnish Newspapers! Frontpage and full page coverage on the largest Finnish Newspaper Helsingin Sanomat (In Finnish) says "Tietokonevika pysâtti Helsingin Sosiaaliviraston maksuliikenteen" [Computer Error stops the Social Payment System of Helsinki] (Helsingin Sanomat 18-2-98 Page B1)

"Tietoviikko" [ComputerWorld Finland] today (20/2/98) commented that the Helsinki City System Falls back to Antique Times. (Sosiaalivirasto putosi antiikin aikaan). For two days, there have been long queues in front of several offices, due to the manual processing.

Latest reports (5 March) indicate that the client has fixed almost all of system owned indexes (rebuild or DBAUDIT) and used user written COBOL Pgms to fix user owned indexes. Consultants from Vegasoft and FSC (Finnish Support Center) were also actively involved in the marathon operation of fixing the broken chains.

Now 3 weeks old, this has been classified as the biggest database corruption in the 25+ years' IDMS History in Scandinavia! At this critcial situation, reports coming from Scandinavian Client base indicate that there are serious broken chains in CA-IDMS Technical Support Management in Scandinavia! Even though 20+ technicians were involved in fixing the problem, one key technician at CA Scandinavia has been kept out of the issue, because of internal problems in CA! IWDG regret this news!

Final Story - June 1998

Latest reports (13 March) indicate that the client has fixed all of system owned indexes (rebuild or DBAUDIT) and used user written COBOL Pgms to fix user owned indexes. The final news (July 1998): We have confirmation now that the corruption had some connection with Expand Page and "hanging records" in the old/new database. This also confirms that the path taken by CA Scandinavia in solving the issue during Feb-May was not in the right direction, and finally veteran Level II person Carl Hess cracked the problem, before resigning from CA!