Booyah! PHP 8.5

Finally the Data Warehouse is running on PHP 8.5.

As all maintainers of Data/Lake/Beach/Business/etc. ware-houses knows, all test/quality/etc. environments forced upon us by ignorant IT architects just make the day-to-day operations much harder with very little benefits. But on occasion you cannot do testing in the production environment. In the Data Warehouse we then create a temporary test environment for the purpose, this time I had to change the bootstrap process which took a little time, with the new bootstrap testing PHP 8.5 went just fine.

For the first time since 2012 The Data warehouse is on par with PHP development. When I started building the Data Warehouse back in 2001 I realized I could build a better development environment with open source tools than the company provided. As an IT manager I could build in hiding without anyone noticed I did not follow any corporate rules. I built my own hardware, used open source software, employed alpha and beta versions in production. I and one coworker just built the Data Warehouse and cranked out reports, apps and analyses mainly to purchasing, logistics, production and marketing. We had full access to the production source system which I had build some 20 years earlier (yes mainframe green screen uglies and all that). We invited the business to explore the data themselves, which was unheard of at the time. One clever guy build a spare part pricing system "PricePoint" on top of the Data Warehouse, and later created his own company "Navetti AB". 

Anyhow some years after the start, I could speak openly about my Data Warehouse, "the business" loved it, and they are key in the company. Now the corporate guys noticed we used Linux and they sent out an emissary to kill it, but it was to late. My coworker was busy as a bee, helping the business cranking out business intelligence at a breakneck speed, he was the de facto business analyst of the company, to a large extent he told the business what they should measure. Only now our dazed management really noticed the Data Warehouse, they saw it, heard about it, even used it. But as the Data Warehouse did not incur any costs they had not really noticed it. I got some (mostly negative!) recognition, my coworker now the facto chief business analyst got almost none (the little he got was positive though). In a fair world my coworker should have had a doubled paycheck and a fancy title.

That was a long story  to say: 2012 the development of the Data Warehouse core stopped. I left the company and became a corporate lead IT architect. At my retirement I came back as a part time consultant maintaining the Data Warehouse. Now when the 4th attempt to replace the Data Warehouse will make it next year, the corporate security forced me to close the technological depth making me work way more than I want. Now when PHP 8.5 is implemented the last piece to upgrade is MySQL which I will start tackle next month.

What will I do after the Data Warehouse? Before I die I hope I come up with some IT related "thing". Those who lives will see. 

A teaser: we must create more energy efficient IT systems. United "drill baby drill" States, will not help, we have to do it ourselves which is a good thing.