David Stein

Archives

Realizations From the Wait List

I’ve been volunteering with my local user group for awhile, and have been preaching community on this blog. One of the best ways to get involved, and learn for that matter, is to participate in SQL Saturdays.

On The Wait List

Recently we decided to host a second SQL Saturday Event later this year. It [...]

Updating a SQL Table From Another Table (Fixing Your Salesperson Admin Mistake)

The Problem

Yesterday I demonstrated how to use T-sql to update the Customer Table (SLCDPM) to avoid hours of manual labor. I mentioned that you should always make a backup of the table before running an update statement in case you’ve made an error.

One of my readers, Kim, astutely asked me how to use [...]

Using T-SQL to Automatically Update M2M Tables

One of the primary values a good DBA brings a company is in automating tedious, time-consuming tasks. In my last article, I discussed the problems when adding a sales person to M2M. M2M’s standard procedure is to create a new sales person and manually re-assign every customer (over 700 of them) to the new sales [...]

Salesperson Administration Problems

Recently we had a salesperson leave our company and they were subequently replaced. I was asked to add the new salesperson and to transfer all of the outgoing person’s accounts to the new guy.

So, I fired up the Salesperson (SLPN) screen and added the new salesperson. This was an internal promotion so I used the [...]

What's in a Name?

In the past two weeks, I’ve had two separate people ask me the same question. They want to know how to decrypt the Utuser.dbf file so they can retrieve their user list from M2M.

While I won’t show you how to break M2M encryption, I will give you two simple ways to get your user [...]

What can I say?

Dennis and I last year.

“They found this growth in my jaw… referred me to an oral surgeon… Sensei, it’s cancer,” Dennis said to me. I was shocked and devastated. This one-two punch was followed by a long pause and then, “They’re going to remove a lot of my lower jaw next week…”

People who [...]

Always Make a Backup When Performing FastForms Customizations

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been using FastForms for years and I have one basic rule that I never, ever break. I never make changes in FastForms with users in the system. M2M says you are safe to do so, but painful experience has shown me that this is unwise.

The problem is that the [...]

I've Got a Golden Ticket!

Hoping to find an everlasting Gob Stopper.

Last year I pined away reading all of the tweets from last year’s PASS.

It was cute, but I meant what I said. I made a promise to myself that I would go to PASS 2010. Well, last night I pulled the trigger and purchased my ticket to go [...]