John Croson's Blog Home

...in this hemisphere that is using R:Base. Although I'm sure if the other person using it reads this, I'll get flamed. I've posted a comment to the "mailing list", and have further convinced myself I'm the only one, next to the list admin, that has subscribed to this list, as my post rendered no comments, and I've not received any messages over a 72 hour period. Since this version (6.5) has few functions as compared to that of some other programming languages I've used, and interacting with the data in the form I've been forced to, I will admit to learning more about fundamental SQL data manipulation, use of Cursor's, SQL functions, etc. I'll have to say overall it's been a satisfying experience, in that it has exercised my brain. Without the luxury of having peer support or newsgroup forums to draw from, I've had to rely solely on the sparse documentation (few examples), and my past coding experience (few examples).

I've been tasked this week to review an R:Base database that is used to parse data from one of our clients, and output it into a usable form for our Misys Tiger server. It's had many little menu items added to it to perform data manipulation over the years, and never really been used to it's full potential. I'm more of a VBA/VB guy, and would rather get this done using Access, but only have a couple of weeks to clean it up before the poor guy that currently has to use this goes on vacation, when I will presumably step in to "scrub and screen" data for interfacing into Misys. Wow, what a clunky piece of stuff. I'm using v6.5, which is quite old, circa 1999 I think. Lots of functions and methods to learn, which is doing to my eyes what pouring salt into would do just quicker... ;-). I'm finding virtually no newsgroup info, and they've removed most legacy application information from their website. *sigh* Guess I'll have to post my questions t...