John Raleigh
139 Woodland Road
Hampton, NH 03842
603-926-6611
jraleigh@jraleigh.net
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John Raleigh |
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Consultant Available...Call or EMail now... |
Access / Database / Visual Basic / DotNet / SQL Server
Microsoft claims that Access provides a powerful set of tools that are sophisticated enough
for professional developers, yet easy to learn for new users. As an advanced
Access database programmer, I have found that this is true, yet many people
have begun projects and while quite pleased with the speed of forms creation, often get tangled
up in the area of queries that are beyond one table in scope.
Access, when used within its limits is quite capable of creating powerful database solutions that
organize and share information among up to 10 or 12 simultaneous users. If you outgrow that, there is
an easy path (i.e. the Access Upsizing Wizard) to upgrade your data to a SQL Server database while
preserving your front-end investment (forms, queries, reports).
As an Access database programmer, I am a regular member of the
Visual Basic .NET,
and Boston DotNet
Private Business Jets Hingham, MA This company arranges charter jet trips for high profile individuals and groups from corporation
executives to rock stars. Their distinction is that they are able to draw on their ten years of
experience in order to quote the requestor immediately on hearing the trip's specifications.
Then, they solve by calling carriers of planes/private pilots they have used before, locating
planes setting idle away from their base or with empty legs, and as a last resort hooking up a
single leg via commercial jets. Maximus Hartford, CT Maximus is a substantial IT consulting firm serving primarily the government sector. As part of their team working for the State of Connecticut's Department of Social Services (DSS), I created a program in Access 2003 to replace a large and intricate set of Excel spreadsheets that managed Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) as well as Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF). There are 12 Agencies involved in this within the Connecticut DSS with names such as Dept. of Children and Families, Dept. of Corrections, Dept of Labor, Judicial, Office of State Treasurer, and so on. Each has many programs and subprograms and are served by many providers. The need was to unify all this data and allow systematic quarterly imports of data from many sources to replace all the manual spreadsheet manipulations that went on before. An additional task was to create complex Access forms that allocate monies from various funding streams to these programs and then estimate what would be required for the following fiscal year. The program also distills all the actual distributions into two formal annual reports named ACF-196 (TANF) and ACF-696 (CCDF). Disetronics Sterile Products Portsmouth, NH Disetronic is a subsidiary of Hoffmann LaRoche. In a clean-room environment, they manufacture clinical devices, especially insulin pumps for diabetics. They had a pressing need to improve the tracking of numbered worklots to track the entire manufacturing cycle. We divided the4 work into two major tasks: Warehousing and Production. As Einstein once said about hypotheses, "Make it as simple as possible, but no simpler."Before doing any coding, we spent the first week just designing the data schema needed to support both sides of their world. With this careful analysis, we were able to do the job with a minimal number of tables. The schema was reduced to a core set named tblLotMaster, tblWarehouse, tblItemMaster, tblSuppliers, tblTransactionLog, and just a few other lookup tables. . Accurate Brazing, Inc, Goffstown, NH Bud had created a very extensive set of operational and financial programs in Access 95. Deployed on 15 PCs throughout the plant, the code was getting severely out of shape because of the variety of operating systems and hardware that it was being asked to run on. It was overdue for an upgrade. Using my offsite lab, I upgraded 4 front-ends plus 4 back-end .mdbs all the way to Access 2003 with no intermediate versions. As is typical, the data went through this process fine, but there were severe anomalies (reported as VBA corruptions) with the Forms and Reports modules. With care and singling out the bad actors for special treatment, the whole set of programs was put into production within three weeks from start. PAX World Funds, Portsmouth, NH This major mutual fund company hired me to finish the work started by a previous Access database programmer. The program tracks commissions owed to brokers all across the country on all kinds of mutual fund transactions. A quarterly import of data is required and I automated this to make life easy for the administrator (Michelle). I later took on Access projects in several other departments including a critical one, Social Screening that is the core of the firm's specialty,. PAX continues to use me for general database support. ProTracker Software, Hampton, NH This specialized software is marketed nationwide to Certified Financial Planning (CFP) firms. The owner, Warren has an excellent reputation, being a recognized "guru" in the industry and a frequent speaker at conventions. I worked on the internal database issues as well as a significant amount of work on the DotNet ECommerce web site the ProTracker uses to market the product. This included downloading data from a web service, working with common dotnet server controls, linking to the data on a remote SQL Server, and plenty of old-fashioned HTML coding. UNITIL Corp, Hampton, NH Unitil Corporation is a public utility holding company supplying gas and electric services. I took up where a previous programmer left off in a complex Access program This is designed to track the monetary benefits of users who voluntarily upgrade their residential or commercial energy equipment. This program handles frequent vendor data imports in a wide variety of formats, from ascii (.txt), Access (.mdb), Excel (.xls), and dbase IV (.dbf). The vendors as well as the users of the equipment are tracked and energy savings are calculated in this program. Fisher Scientific World Headquarters, Hampton, NH Fisher had a bunch of databases containing the results of multiple Quarterly Customer Satisfaction Surveys. They needed a programmer to unify this data so it could be properly queried and reported on and so information across quarters and across divisions would make sense. I have merged all data into one set of normalized tables and am proceeding to rewrite all queries and reports to address the new schema. We are doing this in such a way that an eventual merge of this "seed" data will easily transform into a full CRM system by means of migration into a Siebel ODS (Operational Data Store). Strafford County Dover, NH A new mandate in the State of New Hampshire requires all agencies (>300)
to begin reporting all pension payroll deductions and related information
for all state employees via a file in XML format. Strafford County has 310
employees to report on and the resulting XML rendition is over 4000 lines long.
Roger located me from a web search (oracle programmer nh) and I did the job using
Visual Basic. Tyco International Exeter, NH A local programming house named Compass Systems and Programming created an Employee
Performance program in Access that is deployed at 100 worldwide regions. There were
two very different versions, one for upper management and one for everyone else. I
merged the two code bodies and reproduced all the pre-existing functionality. Acme Brick Company, Houston, TX A large brick plant near Houston, TX located us by searching for our skillset on the Web. We created a quality control program for their production engineer using DotNet technologies that monitored a high resolution video camera. This camera was continually focused on a production line of precured and precut bricks called a "slug". Periodically, the line operator clicks a button to take a picture of the line going by at 1 foot per second. Our Visual Basic DotNet solution grabs a frame from the continuous video stream and displays it on a color monitor side by side with a picture of a known high quality standard for that particular style of brick. Depending on the visual comparison, the operator can take appropriate action such as calling for a change in mixture or other operating parameters. If quality is good, he simply does nothing. We log the picture taking events in order to track the operator taking pictures on a prescribed frequency. Hidden from the operator, there is a secured maintenance module so the engineer can periodically check the log, add new standards, tune the camera settings, and perform other data management features. Genesys Software Corp, Methuen, MA Program: People Come First -- a Web-based Human Resources program. GSC clients are Fortune 500 companies as well as other sites such as state and county governments who have a need for extensive reporting on a wide range of employee activities. The client installations I worked on were in the area of employee education. We built a central report repository, maintained tight user security, used report scheduling, and sought accurate and speedy report processing. As part of a tight and highly skilled development team of 5, I helped provide a scalable web-based solution for managing the access and delivery of hundreds of Crystal reports across the enterprise. These client reports had to be carefully constructed and often rested on SQL joins of up to 20 tables. A very important aspect was speed optimization. The query (view) underlying a particular report was written to take advantage of server-side processing. For example, directing that grouping take place on the server and that execution of the reports be based on data saved with the report, rather than suffering multi-user hits to the server for live data every time. This data was refreshed to the report during off-peak hours. Another optimization was the use of stored procedures as data sources. Although these take time to set up properly, they can be incredibly powerful, especially when running reports off large databases. In the interest of cross-skills enhancement on the development team, I conducted Crystal Reports classes (Basic and Intermediate.) State of NH - Dept of Education, Concord, NH The DOE needed a database programmer in NH to develop a brand new program to deal with a complex new tracking system mandated by the Federal Dept. of Labor. This legislation that created this national system was the Work Incentive Act (WIA) so that is what we named the State of NH response to it. My program tracks out of work participants and a myriad of details about them while they are involved in Job Training and other educational programs to improve their employability. Many business rules and extensive exporting and reporting at the state and federal level. Periodically transmitted the NH data in formatted records of over 3000 bytes to Dept. of Labor main database which collects data for all the states. ...and many other database programming projects going back into the mid 1990s. |
Developer's groups that meet in Manchester, NH and at Microsoft's Waltham offices.
I read (analytically) several current journals, visit technical websites, and take advantage
of the wide variety of developer support for