Swimming in Access

Spent most of yesterday swimming in various Access databases, will probably spend a bunch more of today doing the same thing. Our membership database software is so difficult to use that whenever I have anything more than the simplest SQL functions I wind up pulling everything out into Access and doing the functions there and then importing everything back in. Most of this stuff is routine, I’ve been here long enough that the tools have already been built to do these functions, they just need to be updated once in a while. As luck would have it, this week I have the monthly search for members who haven’t had a dues increase in 3 years, which involves running all the dues payment history through some Access functions, the yearly worker’s compensation group roster came in and needs to be matched up with our membership, which is another Access tool that I’ve built to handle all the different permutations of that (It spits me out 4 seperate lists, depending on what it found in the match.), and the semi-annual update to our Legislative Districts came in as well. I built an Access tool that lets me take the raw zip code-district data that this company sends us, compare it against the nine-digit zip codes of our members and insert all the correct legislative districts into their records.

And I haven’t even mentioned the help desk database that I built either. I haven’t had to use that one yet this week, but I’m sure I will, right? 🙂

It’s days like this that make it seem like I shouldn’t have changed my old title of Database Admin., huh? But then, this is only part of my job, and it’s not nearly as much a part of my job as it was the first year when I actually sat down and built all these tools. Now I just have to update the data, run the queries and do all the exporting/importing into our membership database. That’s not much compared to the first year. More later..

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