In my first role in computers, I spent 8 years working as a Database Manager for a commercial real estate firm. Their commitment to computerizing their data and building contact management and sales systems, as well as financial analysis for business owners, formed the foundation of every aspect of my career journey. With database systems being young, I spent a lot of time understanding all the various types of sorts and indexing systems to really get a feel for data science. The original software system was designed and installed by Raish Enterprises. Having spent several years fine-tuning and designing and coding new modules, the owners frequently ran all my ideas, work, and projects past the original system designers to ensure we didn’t break any of the operations of the system. During those sessions, I spent a lot of time with the software developers from Raish. They invested a lot of time teaching me system design, and later poached me as a project manager to build new custom systems for other companies.
I designed and coded dozens of systems for Raish from the ground up, and database design was my forte. Understanding the data flow is critical to good systems architecture, and every system, application, or tool I have ever put together starts with database schema, tables, fields, primary and foreign keys. But it’s much more than just building tables, fields, and keys. You need to understand data science too. Sorting methods, organization techniques, and table optimization are essential. I have worked with many database systems as the science has evolved over the last 4 decades, including DataStar, DBase III & IV, FoxPRO, SQL, and Mongo. I even had the pleasure of designing my own database systems in C with a custom B-Tree indexing system. I’m a big fan of SQL though; SQL Server, MySQL, and MariaDB are my preferred flavors. I am familiar with Stored Procedures, Triggers, T-SQL, complex Joins, and Unions. I have designed advanced systems that grab all the data from the database Schema and read, write, and build processes and queries programmatically on the back end.
The past 5 years at Visiontron have been spent enhancing a Sage300 data manufacturing ERP system to be better integrated with various other systems, including Salesforce as a Contact Management System. This was a good challenge because Sage300 is not forthcoming with details on system specifications. I built a 2nd Database with ancillary tables for Sage300, then wrapped the whole system in a web-based wrapper, utilizing an in-house Apache Server, and a secure Wi-Fi network to deliver reporting, pick slips, shipping, sales, and status updates to mobile devices on the Manufacturing Floor.