How to stop a development team for over an hour

Yesterday all of our development environments just stopped working over some sub-set of our model. As we had been doing a lot of refactoring, we started rolling back the changes (HBM + Model) until it worked. Yes, it's true, if something fails, we first look at NHibernate.

Another team was having their share of problems. They complained about some problems with NHibernate - it wasn't mapping correctly some data from the database. After some debugging I found the problem: this team didn't commit the changes they were doing at the database! So NHibernate was innocent.

The first team finally come to me with good and bad news:

• after the rolling back, the application started working;
• after unrolling it back, the application resumed working!

Boy, were we in trouble. We confirmed the version control to me sane, and then it hit me: this team was sufering from the table locking from the first team!

The second team was using TOAD to edit some data over the database. Apparently TOAD got a table lock when editing over the datagrid, so all of the inserts the first team tried just blocked. As NHibernate was the new kid on the block, he got the blame.

Good for you, NHibernate. Bad for you, TOAD.