Originally Posted by Freebase Dali

So today we had a unique production bug at work that needed a test environment to troubleshoot that we did not have. Basically one computer with our software that could access the database of another computer on the same network which had a different instance of our database and software.

So the guys were all palling around saying it won't work because people (before my time there) had tried it many times before, for years, and it never worked, so they were wasting all sorts of time trying to think of alternatives.

So I walked to the computer whose SQL database needed to be accessed by the other computer, opened SQL Configuration Manager and set a port for it to listen on and the static IP of the computer, then restarted the SQL service. Opened that port up in the firewall for incoming connections from the static IP of the other computer. Went to the other computer and modified the software's connection string in its config file to use the IP address of the database computer with the listening port and appropriate SQL username and password, then hit save.

Opened the application and it connected to the database of the other computer. Took me like 2 minutes. Solved. I'm not even a full blown DBA and I know this. I thought software developers learned things about SQL and other database solutions in college. It is, after all, the back-end of any application, web or not, that stores data. Why am I the one solving these things?

Anyway, I did a victory walk back to my desk.

Then surfed Reddit for the rest of the day.