As the economic climate continues its hold managers and business owners are continuing to seek tangible opportunities to reduce costs and increase efficiencies. On initial consideration the feasibility of this appears to be an enigma however complacency and time pressures in organisations of all sizes reveal intensive manual processes, repeat data entry, disconnected systems and burdensome administrative tasks which can easily be streamlined with a low investment in custom software.

• Streamline Operations
• Increase Workforce Efficiencies
• Connect your Mobile Workforce
• Increase Operational Efficiencies
• Slash Duplication of Effort
• Reduce Operating Costs
• Remove burdensome Administration

Successful departmental and core line of business applications can quickly outgrow their original purpose leaving slow performing spreadsheets and database applications which are prone to corruptions and support only a few simultaneous users.
Typically many organically emerged in-house application do not perform well over mobile and wide area network connections and as business acquisitions, new offices setup and home working grows in trend supporting mobile field staff and a disparate workforce needs smart and secure connectivity solution along with specialist and custom software solutions.
Return on investment can be easily calculated to support investment justification by calculating the amount of man hours saved versus the cost of development.
For example an estate agents inputting new rental property has spend the past five years inputting the property information to internal spreadsheets then check with the accounts team then re-enter the information onto the company web site and place the property with several advertising media taking 3 hours each. The custom software removes duplication in this pipeline, provides integration with accounting systems, third-parties and internal departments to reduce the operation to 30 minutes freeing up the salesperson to generate more leads and develop new opportunities. In this real world scenario the business gained over 83% efficiency saving in a workforce of 12 staff for processing sales of rental properties.
The business case writes itself and as a department manager or business owner you can decide to run the operation with a smaller team or increase volume.
Custom Software is not for every requirement but does allow you to define the way you want to work without confirming to an off-the-shelf package that is designed for the mass market.
SymTex are specialists in custom database and software development building robust solutions for SME public and private sector clients including big banking corporations, insurance giants and national utility companies working nationwide.

Tell us about your database and software challenges.
Visit us at symtex.co.uk or call 0800 58 70 949 today.

This question is not unique to non-software developers, often we encounter this scenario internally, and being a development company you would imagine from the outside our software was all singing in perfect harmony with workflows, integrated CRM and web site etc... and we’re working on it.  However if I had my way the choice would be to build a customised solution from the ground up; integrating with all existing applications in the environment, Accounts, CRM, Invoicing and so on using SaaS (Software as-a Service) to loosely couple distinct functional tools and products used throughout the enterprise together. 

The benefits developing bespoke SaaS solutions is that when you come to implement they behave exactly as you specified and achieve the job from day one, albeit a few minor bugs to work out.  The alternative is selecting an existing product which may well not be open-source and introducing a dependency on external vendors to build in new functionality, provide bug fixes and the like.  However the investment is normally low when considered against how much time it would take internally to develop and test internal solutions and of-course at the distraction to business as usual activities and neglecting potential business growth, networking and sales opportunities.

So how do you decide whether to build or buy?  From a commercial view the right questions need to be asked to discover total cost, timescales, ongoing support, contractual requirements, dependencies and service level agreements.  Often SLAs don’t work too well internally as the concept to leverage financial weight is lost.  Techies within an organisation will already often be saturated with workload and whilst happy to take on a new requirement this may be outside of core skills and a steep learning curve is required at the cost expense, and often pain, of their employer.

What factors do you consider when choosing to build or buy?

As Microsoft SQL Server specialists we are increasingly asked to provide training workshops and knowledge transfer sessions for Database Administration (DBA) tasks and best practices.  The majority of enquiries are for managing large database, i.e. those over 50Gb are around the size we say a database starts getting large, or for clients with many servers and databases in their estate.

Training the Database Administrator - Classic Training Topics

Typically we find that customers want a training workshop covering install and configuration for SQL Server, managing database files, backup and restore of databases, managing security, monitoring SQL Server activity, transferring data in and out of SQL Server, automating administrative tasks.  Requests for high availability overviews such as technology heads-up for clustering, log shipping and replication, snapshot and other high availability database engine technologies.

Advanced Query Writing

Supplying colleagues and management with the information they demand can be a daunting task.  These types of requests landing on the lap of someone responsible for the environment is often called Management Information (MI) and can take two forms.  The first is a request for a specific query to be written that has not been requested before to examine data from a unique angle or perspective to identify trends or patterns in behaviour.  The second is a reoccurring request for the same data at different intervals or varying parameters; the only obstacle here is to get the structure of the query written and then make the information accessible to the requestor without having to put pressure on your time repeatedly.  We achieve this most often using SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to which the requestor can subscribe to have the information delivered into their Inbox at the desired frequency and provides the ability to graphically render charts and pivot tables.

Performance Management, Locking and Concurrency

SQL Server Profiler and Query Analyser is the tool of choice when developing new queries and seeing how existing database code is efficiently, or most of the time un-efficiently, handled.  It’s never the intention that database developers don’t want their code and queries to be executed optimally but an in-depth knowledge of how the core database engine translates and processes those queries is often not understood.  Covered queries, good index selection and locking hints are a good starting point in training developers and DBAs how to get the fastest responses and levels of concurrency.  Concurrency is a measurement of how many users, or queries, can be processed in parallel.  These parallel operations may be several hundred multiple repetitions of the same query or high contention for the data resource.  This could be data pages, locks on data pages, rows of tables or physical resource waits on disk, CPU or memory.