What am I paying you for?

Once upon a time ... 

I had a job as a DBA. It was your typical Monday to Friday, business hours gig. 

When I started there, the system was a mess. Constantly going down, slow, no decent backup/restores happening, nor indexing, check DBs etc ... 

After a few months, I got it all under control, and even scored a payrise ... the kind where the boss calls you in and just tells you you're getting a raise because your efforts have been noticed. 

Fast forward a few months ...

The boss comes down to the IT room (on the ground floor, of course ... how stereotypical) ... 

I'm standing around doing nothing, except shooting hoops with the toy basketball hoop. 

He looks at me and says "what am I paying you for?" 

I look at the SQL CPU .. it's low. Backups worked, everything is humming. Did he want me to break something just so that I had something to do. 

That was when I really came to the realisation that DBA work was not for me. I did my job perfectly, but still had to turn up every Monday at 9am to do nothing!

Import Excel into SQL Server

Currently a Covid Lockdown in Sydney and so I'm bored. Therefore, I decided I'd share some knowledge from all the years of ETL work I've done. 

In this video I show a simple way to get around an annoying "Microsoftism" when doing what should be a straightforward import of data from Microsoft Excel in SQL Server. 

The 'Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0' provider is not registered on the local machine. (System.Data)

If you've ever tried using the SQL Server Import and Export Wizard, and received that error, you'll know how frustrating it is ... 

Here's the solution: 

Can you tell your customers if you moved premises?

In the building next to us is a mechanic. He used to be in a different factory unit, but due to that owner selling, he was forced to move into a less desirable factory out the back. 

When I asked him why he chose this factory to rent, and not one with more exposure down the road, he said it was because all his clients knew that he was in this block of units. 

It still amazes me, and will until the day I drop dead, that people don’t keep a database of their customers.

I know my mechanic has never emailed me. If he moved, I wouldn’t know where to find him! He would lose my family as customers and have to find new ones.

If your business has all its clients’ information stored, even just the basics, then you can email or ring them when you have important changes - like changing address! 

You probably worked really, really hard to build your clientele. Don’t leave them behind when you move. 

Build a database … or better yet, contact me and ask me to build it for you!

Excel <> Database!

Please STOP using Excel for managing your customer data. 

Excel has its place, but that place is not being a surrogate database! 

Last week we took on a new client in Cronulla (a small community based sporting club) who had been managing their attendances with spreadsheets. The poor girl whose job it is to work out who's coming and who isn't was struggling big time. 

We were able to take that data and import it into our Arnold Gym Management System, and now her workload has been trimmed by over 90%! 

Help us rid the world of Excel Spreadsheets being used as databases!