My long-term business partner, Trent, told me the other week he was going to write a rebuttal to my previous rant, “What’s wrong with ClearQuest“, called “What’s getting slightly better about ClearQuest”. I think he’s struggling to fill a few paragraphs though, because it hasn’t been forthcoming.
He recently wrote a reply on the forum that the admins must have deleted, completely lacking a sense of humour as they do. Anyway, it’s worth blogerising for posterity.
i am a fresher to clearquest.i am still in learning phase of it.i will be very thankful to you if some of you can give me some information on clearquest scope for career growth
In my neck of the woods you’re more typically seeing $35.00/hr for a contract position for ClearQuest admin.
Trent responded with the following:
$35/hr? To work on ClearQuest? No thanks, I’d rather stay home and pull teeth.
I won’t get out of bed these days for anything less than £100/hr if I have to do ClearQuest work. And I increase my minimum hourly rate annually at about 5 times the rate of inflation. You can be horrendously incompetent in London and still fetch £450-600/day, depending on whether your client has any idea about ClearQuest. (The hidden subtext here is that you can make a lot of money claiming to specialise in ClearQuest, and as long as no-one else in the company knows any better, get away with it even if you know diddley-squat.)
Continue reading ‘What’s Wrong with ClearQuest II’
This blog describes the process for moving or copying ClearQuest schema and user databases between two separate database instances using the database vendor’s native facilities. This approach has a few of advantages over the standard Move /Copy Database facilities provided by ClearQuest (either those used via the Maintenance Tool or Designer, or via command line utilities like installutil.exe):
- Speed. Restoring a database using the database vendor’s facilities is always quicker than the facilities ClearQuest provides.
- No network connectivity required. ClearQuest’s facilities require simultaneous access to the source and destination database instances. This isn’t always desirable or possible.
The approaches shown in this blog apply to Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server.
Continue reading ‘Relocating, moving or copying ClearQuest schema and user databases using database vendor facilities’
I’ve done some pretty masochistic ClearQuest database migrations in my time. By masochistic I mean that instead of using the Rational recommended approach for a database migration (I don’t even know what that is. Fiddling around with the import/export tool? No thanks!), I’ll write routines in Transact/SQL or PL/SQL (SQL Server and Oracle’s procedural language extensions to SQL, respectively) to manually coerce the data into shape. Why? Tends to be more fun. It’s a lot faster than any other approach, too.
Continue reading ‘All you ever wanted to know about ClearQuest IDs…’
I seem to be using decorators in my Python code more and more each day. Given that I’m meant to be giving a short presentation on decorators to the New York Python User Group tomorrow evening, I figured I’d whip up a quick blog post to get some ideas flowing. (Update: the presentation is now available for download here.) This post briefly touches on my initial experience with decorators, offering a slightly crude but potentially more accessible explanation of them in comparison to the standard Python documentation. I’ll then jump in and share a bunch of decorator idioms I’ve found to be useful in my day-to-day code.
Continue reading ‘Useful Python Decorator Idioms’
I’m a big fan of spreading my desktop over as many monitors I can find. When I’m working from home, this usually entails four monitors, each with 1920×1200 resolutions (made possible due to the excellent software MaxiVista, which I highly recommend). When I’m travelling or working on a client’s site, I’ll typically have to go back down to just my laptop display. One thing that has always bugged me though is when applications decide to position themselves at their last launched coordinates, even though that desktop location no longer exists. I decided to do something about it today, and wrote a little Python script to move windows that are offscreen back to the main desktop, provided below.
Continue reading ‘Fix Window Placements’
During the normal course of ClearQuest development, I often want to create a new development database from a production backup and have it available from the same schema (i.e. I don’t want to create a separate schema database from a production snapshot as well). Because you can’t have two user databases registered to a schema with the same logical database name, you need to be able to change the logical name of the newly created development database in some way. For example, if my production database is called LON, I want to call my new development instance LOND1 (I use the convention ‘D’ to indicate a development database; other conventions: ‘A’ for acceptance/UAT, and ‘S’ for staging). This blog assumes your new development database has been created and subsequently primed using production data (see my other blog posts on how to accomplish this).
Continue reading ‘Changing the logical name of a ClearQuest user database.’
I’ve done some pretty masochistic ClearQuest database migrations in my time. By masochistic I mean that instead of using the Rational recommended approach for a database migration (I don’t even know what that is. Fiddling around with the import/export tool? No thanks!), I’ll write routines in Transact/SQL or PL/SQL (SQL Server and Oracle’s procedural language extensions to SQL, respectively) to manually coerce the data into shape. Why? Tends to be more fun. It’s a lot faster than any other approach, too.
Continue reading ‘Create your very own ClearQuest dbids…’
I was going through old SQL snippets I’ve collected the other day and came across this little chestnut that counts the lines of hook code in a ClearQuest database. Horrendously useless in the grand scheme of things, unless you enjoy distracting yourself from real work with useless info. (Apparently I do.)
Continue reading ‘Counting lines of code in ClearQuest hooks (SQL Server)’
I’m not aware of the history behind it, but Classics is quite a handy little collection of resources when it comes to testing our products against a standard run-of-the-mill ClearQuest schema. It contains all sorts of things like RequisitePro databases and testing stuff, but what I rely on it most for is the ClearQuest CLSIC database it contains.
Continue reading ‘IBM Rational ‘Classics’: Sample ClearQuest and RequisitePro Projects (and who knows what else…)’