They like it

I showed everyone at work the WordPress site I had running on my local system (WinXP Pro, Apache 2, MySQL) and they liked it. A lot. Some of the comments I got were:

Good job
Nice work
About freakin’ time

Two out of three positive aren’t bad.

I ended up having to dump the Pool theme. For some reason, I could log into the admin panel once but not any more after logging out of it. That’s not good because I can’t manage the site without being able to log in to the admin panel. In order to get around that, I had to rename the theme folder. WordPress will use the default theme if the one you have set for use can’t be found. I decided to just use the default theme with a few modifications (mostly the header).

Today marks the day I got over a big hurdle at work. I got the ACT file import to work on the data warehouse. I ended up having to design the DTS package to run three update scripts to assign the student number.

The first updates the temp table and adds the student number by comparing the student SSN to the SSN in my student tables. The second adds the student number by comparing the last name, full DOB (YYY-MM-DD) and either the first four characters of the first name or the middle initial to the student tables only on the rows where the student number is still NULL. The third, and final update, adds the student number by comparing the last name, first four characters of the first name, the middle initial and the month/year (YYYY & MM) of the DOB to the student tables only on the rows where the student number is still NULL.

I had to do only the month/year because I found out some of the kids put the wrong day on their DOB. I guess the pressure of taking a national standardized test was too much.

The reason I only use the first four characters of the first name is because of where I pull my information from, the student information database. We have some foriegn kids and let’s say their first name should be Sang Ho. On the ACT test, that is what they would put as their first name. Unfortunately, in the student information database, the school personnel put their first name as “Sang” and their middle name as “Ho”. So, I had to substring the first name and only use the first four characters.

During the final test today, it ran without a hitch. Over 2,000 student ACT records from 19 files were pulled into the warehouse in under seven seconds. Best of all, I found out that four out of the next five test that I have to pull in, via flat files, will basically use the same DTS package! All I have to do is change how the files are parsed and what tables/columns the values go into but that’s a lot better than having to create a DTS from scratch. Code reuse is a good thing.

One thing you might find amusing. The ACT scores are sent in flat files with either a “.txt” or “.001″ extension. What is the extension on the flat file for the SAT? “.SCR”! That’s right, they gave it the same extension as a Windows screen saver file. I thought something might be wrong with the file, they send them on floppy disk(?), but I opened it with WordPad and it had all the data in it. Weird.

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal. – Henry Ford

23.Feb.06 General, Microsoft SQL, WordPress