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Fri - Aug 31, 2007 : 05:50 pm
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Survey Says... "The Data is GOOD!"
Okay, people....

I was hired on here at Nature's Way as the only person in the IT department who knows anything about web development.  Almost all people here are either networking, helpdesk, or SAP gurus.  They desperately needed help in the web development corner of IT.  So... They hired me.  Go figure.

Anyway...  I was initially hired on to re-do the website which they had spent ..... *lots* of money on... (lots.....and lots......... and lots of money)....  But, when I actually arrived here, they told me I had to do some "sales reports" before I actually got to work on the website.

The sales reports consist of like..... 8 tables or so, one of which has more than 12 million rows in it.

Connecting directly to Oracle to make these reports was definitely not a good idea, seeing as the server providing the reports will be housed off-site. So, I decided to use the wonderful PostgreSQL database engine to take on the task.

I then created a cron job which basically takes the Oracle db and syncs it with the Postgres one with new data.

These sales reports have been extremely difficult to nail down because of the nature of the data within Oracle.  This is due to our using (or mis-using) a monstrosity of a program called SAP.  SAP is "so freaking huge, no one person on earth *really* knows how it works" (multiple people at work here have backed that statement as being true).

To add fuel to the fire, the Oracle db which is the back-end of SAP isn't normalized at all.

So...  I had to basically create a system which takes this load of data, normalize it into a db scheme which will speed things up, and maintain integrity, without losing any integrity along the way.

These reports needed to be *perfect*...... to the penny.

Well....  I'm here to tell you that today was the day which is the cause for great joy in the IT dept of Nature's Way.  Yes, folks, the data synced up - to the penny.

And what a glorious accomplishment that is.

Now I can begin to actually create reports from this data - which is eeeeeeasy pickin's compared to that data-sync script.

So....  Happy day!.... Happy day, indeed.

Oh yeah... we're also leaving to go to Monterey California for a week tomorrow morning!

I'll probably have a few audio files in the near future added to my blog.