Who’s the man?!?

March 17th, 2009 mattdaddy

Have you ever had a problem/issue/project that just wouldn’t f’in go away?  It’s like trying to get your hand around something slippery – the harder you squeeze, the faster it slips away?

Yeah, that’s about what my year has been like so far.  So to be able to have a “YES” moment when things finally fell into place was a welcome change from the constant battering I’ve been doing against all of the brick walls that keep springing up.  FTNITK, I’m a web applications developer for a company in White Plains NY (it’s just north of NYC).  I live in NJ, so my commute is considerable, but I don’t really mind it because I love my job.  We run nursing homes in the south, and one of the biggest obstacles we have is centralization of data – getting all of the good stuff, in one place, so everyone can use it to move forward.

We have this chunk of data that I need in 47 different places, and I need to collect it all and put it in a readable format.  I can set up a job to go out to each database individually, grab some data, and pull it back here.  The problem is, the db’s are really old and don’t talk directly to my new shiny ones, and I don’t want to write 47 copies of the same job because if I have to make a change, it’ll have to be to all of them.

So I’ve been trying to figure out a way to write one job, and just change where I point it.  FINALLY got it today and I’m going to do more work on it tomorrow because now I’m going home.  I’ve done enough for today.

if you’ve gotten this far and you’re interested – it’s an SSIS job mining data from Keane RAM applications Progress database and pushing it to a data warehouse that I’m building.  Lots of moving pieces.  Ugh.