I've Been Occupied

For the last several days - getting close to 2 weeks - I've been working on a new project for my boss at A&P. He wanted me to learn SQL (database stuff) and Reporting Services (drawing data out of databases to make a nice report). Eventually I'm supposed to be a back-up and assistant to our full-time Reporting Services person (the field is called "Business Intelligence"). But the only exposure I've had to it were two 3-day classes.

So now, I'm diving in head first. It's so impressive what one can do with data - the software is amazing. It could be seen as straightforward as MS Word (and it almost is), but it is also as flexible as coding one's own program from scratch. The straightforwards stuff is what I've been picking up very quickly. However, as one might imagine, it is hard to make one's creativity turn into reality without knowing the coding language very well. But I'm learning.

And I'm getting ready to publish my first report. Actually, the report had already been created - I'm just reworking it. It was the best place for me to start so I didn't have the "blank page" staring back at me. (Someone had already worked the clay and I was just reshaping it a bit.) The report has to do with the progress my own department (IT dept) makes on Service Requests. The previous reports had us looking better than we really were doing. Some of it was that we were falling behind. Most of it was that we were lazy to let the database know when we started and ended work on a Service Request. Hopefully, we will "reset" the stats soon and get off to a fresh start.