Made2Mentor

All the Little Ants are Marching…

“I got an ant farm; them fellas didn’t grow shit.” – Mitch Hedberg

A few months ago I became aware that a company I deal with still uses dot matrix printers. For those of you who have never seen one, that’s because most companies phased these relics out of existence fifteen years ago.

The dot matrix printer [...]

Removing Null Country Values From the Syaddr Table

Unfortunately M2M does not automatically populate the Country field on many screens when a US State is selected. This can cause problems in reporting when an executive wants sales broken down by country and many of them are grouped under Null.

Anyway, if you want to see how many addresses are missing “United States” you [...]

Standard Disclaimer

As I was preparing to post another script, this time with an update statement, I started to insert my standard disclaimer. However, as more and more of my posts will include SQL code, I thought I would just dedicate one post for the disclaimer and then link to it. So, without further adieu…

Important: All information [...]

M2M Database Polls

One of my crappy college jobs was in market research. Yes, I was one of those annoying guys in the mall holding a clipboard. I would approach you, politely ask you about your soda preferences (for the enlightened folks we call it Pop), and then take you back into the “store” to do a taste [...]

Tool Dependence

My girlfriend really loves the Amazing Race Show, which of course means that I have to “love” it too. It’s a reality TV show where teams compete in contests all over the world with a one million dollar prize at the end. Anyway, in one episode of last season the contestants were in Dubai. The [...]

MacGyver Moments

Total Badass

We may have never saved the world with a paper clip, chewing gum, and duct tape, but many of us are MacGyvers in our daily lives. Perhaps we’re stuck with SQL Server 6 or running on ridiculously old equipment, for whatever reason we’ve had to make something out of junk.

I was reminded [...]

Let’s Play the Orphaned Records Game

In the past couple of weeks, I have discussed the problems of orphaned records in the M2M Database and promised to provide a script to find them. So, I’ve decided to turn it into a game.

If you’d like to play, paste the following script into your Query Analyzer or SQL Server Management Studio and [...]

That’s Quite a View – INMast

A Made2Manage customer called me with a serious performance problem with one of his custom reports. After I looked at it, I realized that the inventory changes in M2M Version 6.0 were the culprit. To give you some idea of his problem, the query in question ran took a few seconds before the migration and [...]

Another Visual Basic (VBA) Rant

Recently I got a call from another M2M Consultant who was attempting to install M2M on Windows 7. He simply could not get VBA to work. I asked him to run through the steps and I found his problem right away. He had made a mistake early in the process; I have made similar mistakes [...]