One cold winter night in the North Pole, during the height of the pre-Christmas season, Santa’s workshop was bustling.
The toy elves were working away as Dasher, Dancer, and Prancer, and their reindeer friends were training for the big run. Santa set about to review the annual Naughty & Nice Report. He sat down to his computer, switched it on, and waited for the latest version to load.
Santa Claus waited, and waited, and waited some more, then nothing. Until — horror of horrors — his screen went black. Santa’s database had crashed!
A Lost List Thanks to Data Overload
For more than twenty years, the Naughty & Nice list had been stored on an Access database and updated yearly, but with the world population growing beyond expectations, it got too big. It was an extreme case of data overload, and now the list was lost!
What would happen to Christmas? Would it vanish like the dinosaurs and dodo birds? Would future boys and girls miss out on the magic of Santa?
Santa didn’t know what to do; he was so distraught that he was in danger of pulling every hair out of his fluffy, white beard. What was he to do with all the presents piling up in the North Pole? How could he possibly know who gets toys and who gets coal? He pondered and pondered. Finally, he remembered he had a very special elf. If anyone could help him, it would be her — Snowdrop Fizzysleigh, head of Santa’s Workshop IT Department.
An Attempted Fix with Spreadsheets
I bet you didn’t know that Santa’s Workshop had an IT department, but they do! How else do you think they keep track of all of those kids and presents? Do you have any idea how many children there are in the world, both naughty and nice? Like a billion — that’s a lot of presents! And over the years, Santa kept track of them in all sorts of different ways. There were scrolls and abacuses, and notebooks, which, as you can imagine, were quite tricky to maintain. But then the 60s came, and Santa got this massive computer, it was huge and practically took up the whole shop.
When computers got smaller and more elf size, they tried spreadsheets. But once the never-ending data in columns and rows became too tricky to manage, they hired an Access database developer. Santa and the elves thought that would be it, an answer to their prayers, all was wonderful! Well, it was wonderful at first anyway.
Snowdrop Fizzysleigh was the elf responsible for managing the Naughty & Nice database, and over the years, she added more and more data in the form of Susies and Billies and Bobbies. And all was well until that fateful night when the crash happened; they were sure that Christmasgeddon had arrived!
Luckily Snowdrop Fizzysleigh knew just what to do; she searched for a custom software company and found AxiaTP.
A Better Solution: Custom Software
Our team built a reliable, remote-accessed, cloud-based application with geolocation tracking, tailored to the unique needs of Santa’s Workshop.
Now, Santa Claus and Snowdrop Fizzysleigh no longer worry about how many names they add or how many times they move kids from naughty to nice because the North Pole’s custom software can handle it. It lets Santa and Snowdrop keep track of who’s naughty and who’s nice in real-time, and Santa can even get updates on the fly!
And that’s the story of how custom software saved Christmas.
If a custom software solution can manage Santa’s workshop, imagine what it can do for you! Reach out today to learn more.