Keeping posted

It has finally come, my last day of internship. It has being a great experience, which I will never forget. This will probably not be the last post in the blog, but the last one from India anyway.

I have not updated my blog as often as I would have liked to do it these last weeks. Unfortunately, I do not have many more topics for the tutorials. I could bring some stuff about Data Migration like LSMW or BDC, or even about SMARTFORMS, but doing that would require much more time. Instead I will post some links which I found during my internship that have helped me a lot. And I also have a post about SQL queries in SAP, which I would very much like to share with you, but it still needs some revision.

This last month we have gotten into a routine, and apart from the ones who took the opportunity to visit more of India, we have only been wandering around Bangalore, getting presents for the people back at home, and enjoying as much of the city as we could.

I will see many of you readers very soon. To all the others, thanks for your support and until next time!

Where is the energy?

The blasts in India are not the only topics written about in the newspapers these last days. There are other important things, like the death or a pop star or that last Bollywood movie. But just before the terrorist attacks began, and even if many have already forgotten about it, there was a power shortage problem.

Apparently the government did not make the predictions right and they now have less power than necessary. Everyday, and often more than 5 times a day, there is blackout. At our apartment, the green light near the door goes on and if you keep the AC or the water heater on, after 10 min the power will run out.

At the office half the lights go out, the AC stop buzzing and nobody could care less. Everyone keeps working, and using their computers, may it be desktops or laptops. Internet connection and servers continue to work. You can only hear the generators starting, and after less than a minute everything is back to normal.

Elevators are the only thing which are affected by it. They stop and go to the bottom floor. For somebody inexperienced like me, it can be quite a scary experience. For the Bangaloreans, nothing more than a reminder of why they cannot only rely on the generators.

This also influences the oil problem. People queuing at the petrol stations is the everyday scenario here. They are trying to get diesel for their cars or for the power generator at the office or home. Luckily enough, we have not yet had very hot days. The weather continues to be very comfortable, and even sometimes a bit chilly.

They are now saying we will experience more than 8 hours of power shortage daily in the cities, and even up to 18 hours in the country side. Time will tell how Bangalore manage the power supply for so many servers and people. Time and politics.

The Blasts

Today between 14 and 15 o’clock there were 7 bomb blasts in Bangalore. One of them was very near to the place where our apartments are. Two people died and more than 20 were injured. People at the office were not too worried about it, actually took it with a lot of humor.
We were all at the office during the attacks, and were not affected by it. Well we received and sent lots of emails and sms, and were maybe not as efficient as any other workday, but we survived and lived to blog about it. :-)

TPS Report

It has already been a bit more than 2 weeks of Internship so far, and I actually wanted to write something about my work. I even had something almost written. Well, here is the thing: I am not allowed to do it. Everything is confidential, everything is top secret.

The only facts I MAY be able to tell you, because I have already told everyone about it anyway, are:

• I work with SAP technology (is pronounced S.A.P. for those of you who have never heard about it before)
• I will probably learn some ABAP, the programming language which SAP is programmed in (this is called abap and not A.B.A.P.)

I guess now that you know that, I can tell you what SAP is all about.

SAP is a system used in companies to plan and organize the business process, and specially at the same time manage the financial aspect of the company. There are different areas of the system which can be implemented for a company, and inside this areas many different modules. These modules are already implemented in the original SAP version, but of course no two companies are the same. So that is when you have to call the consultants. They come and see how your business process works, write the requirements for the implementation and send the job to India to be done, what is called outsourcing.

Here in India, the modules get implemented, and sent to the client. To implement these modules you use ABAP (Allgemeiner Berichts-Aufbereitungs-Prozessor) which is an object oriented programming language, with SQL queries in it, which is nothing more than the use of tables and information from these.

Well, this much I can tell you right now. I will come back later with some more information, just understand that things do not go as fast here as at university, and we specially do not get to normalize databases. Well at least I don’t :-)

Of Indian Temples and Palaces

As our first week of work ended, we decided we should get to know a bit more of Bangalore. Romain organized a tour with the most important places, got it checked by some colleges at work, and we went out Saturday morning at 9:30.

We visited the Bangalore Palace. It was very nice, though nothing very especial if you have visited other places like Alhambra in Granada or the Windsor Castle, but in the same style as the latest. This Palace was constructed for the Maharaja of Mysore, in 1884. Every piece of glass has been imported from Belgium, and every painting on its walls has been painted by Raja Ravi Varma, a very well known Indian painter. The fotographs on the walls (which are hand painted and do not have any wallpaper) remind you of the different Maharajas (High Kings) of Mysore and their lifes.

After this, we visited the different goverment’s buildings in Cubbon Park. They were impressive, and even more impressive the security, which did not allow us to enter the gardens to take pictures. On another note, the sentences written on the facade of the buildings were all very peculiar.

We ate something for lunch at the Lido Restaurant, located at the Ista Hotel, which I found amazing and enjoyed very much.

And finally we visited the Bull Tempel, with its huge Bull sculpture, and got some pretty weird blessing :-)

I’ve got an indian number!!

Before coming here many people said everything takes much longer to be processed and you need to be patient. I did believe it, but somehow I though I would be lucky enough not to have to cope with it. Well, Vodafone did not let me down. Here is the story.

On Friday morning we went to 3 or 4 different mobile phones stores. All of them told us to get the necesary papers. Passport, photos and a residence proof. So, we went to the Apartment manager and asked her for the residence proof.

Saturday morning we did not get the residence proof. In the afternoon we asked again, and they told us in the evening it would be in our apartment.

Sunday afternoon we found the proofs on the kitchen table.

So up to then, it did not look too bad. I mean who does not need a day to make a copy of a paper? So, Sunday evening we went to the shop and got our SIM cards. They were all working. Well, all but mine and Shenji’s. Shenji’s was not working because his telephone is locked for Swisscom. Mine was not activated.

So Sunday evening I went to the shop. They told me it would be working the day after.

It did not work!

So I went on Monday there, and told them it was not working. After 30 min of waiting, and just writing the SIM card number on a Post-it, he just told me on Tuesday evening it would be working.

It did not work!

At this moment I was just angry with the people from Vodafone, did not want to have anything to do with them anymore, and decided on Wednesday evening I would go to Airtel (Vodafone’s rival). But wait, I had to get another residence proof. Well, this was starting to get very annoying.

So, I call the people from the apartment, but they say they can give me a proof tomorrow. I just took my telephone, put Vodafone’s SIM card inside, and wanted to get going to Vodafone for the fourth time, when I realize my telephone was working!!!

It worked!

After 4 days and a lot of hassle. Indian Style!

Hello everyone, still in Switzerland

Well, just next week, on Friday 19th we will be flying to Bangalore. Me and four other guys. We will be working at Accenture as part of our summer Internship. Three of us have just finished the second year of Computer Science at the ETH Zürich. We are all studying at the ETHZ, the others being master students. Mr. Kossmann is the professor who organized this internship. He contacted Accenture and convinced them to take us for an internship. We had the pleasure of having him as a professor in the lecture Introduction to Databases, and I know he would love to come with us and do the internship himself, so I just want to thank him for giving us the opportunity.

I will be keeping you updated on our experience about the internship and about the people and culture in India. I have never been to India before, not even Asia, so this is really going to be a first for me. I have been reading Kulturschok Indien this last week, which is a really nice lecture, but I have been warned to take everything in the book with a pinch of salt, as Bangalore is a very modern city, and the book is mostly based on the rural life.

I would like to write here some of the clichés I have read, just to make a comparison at the end of the internship and be able to see how much of what you normally read about a place is true.

• India is overpopulated, you will see children everywhere
• People are very outgoing, they speak a lot, and they will invite you to eat very often, even if they do not know you very well
• Bureaucracy. Everything takes longer than expected
• It is normally very filthy, on the streets and even in restaurants.
• You will surely have stomach trouble at some point.
• People prefer talking than answering emails.

The only experience I have had so far has been with the visa. I sent my visa application together with passport, copy of residence, payment receipt, pictures, letter of invitation and payed return envelope on Tuesday 3rd, and received my passport back on Friday 6th. In it I found the business visa for India. So that was my first very good impression of Indian bureaucracy. I just hope it stays that way for the whole summer, though something tells me I will have many more opportunities to prove my hypothesis.

I will be writing as often as possible, however if I do not have enough time I will try to write min twice a week.

Hope you stay tuned, see you in two weeks.