Databases – How We Love to Hate Them!

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Monday, 13 October 2008

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By:Cavyl Stewart

You’ve finally created databases that you can actually use to
store and manipulate all your critical data. That’s great news
and quite an accomplishment. But in your rush to get your
employees to start entering information into these databases, you
skipped the training process and let them go at it alone.

That was not such a good decision, but one you did not care about
until you decided to tackle your first mail merge. Instead of
getting what you expected to get, you got all variations of
address and telephone number formats, an incredible and
astounding assortment of confusingly mixed usage of upper and
lower case characters and fields with unusual amounts of white
space that you’ve finally figured out is due to excessive use of
the space bar. The data looks cluttered, inconsistent, and worst
of all, unprofessional.

You don’t have time to go back into every record and manually fix
these annoying inconsistencies, nor do you want to pay your staff
to do this when they have so many other things to do. But you’ve
got to get your promotion going so money can start arriving in
your business checking account. Now what do you do?

There is a way you can go in and clean up these types of data
messes and it won’t involve firing the employees who caused the
problems in the first place! Nor will you have to become
proficient at database programming. As with any good business
problem, there’s a software solution available that you can use
instead.

It’s called DataPipe and it will clean up these and other types
of database errors faster and less expensively than you can do it
manually or by using other software tools. It does not matter
which standard ODBC or OLE DB you are using. Just use its drivers
to connect to DataPipe. From there, it’s a matter of selecting
the database and query or table you need to work on. Then sit
back and watch as it works its magic in record time.

Even if you use packaged customer relationship management
software at your business – products like Goldmine, ACT!,
Epiphany and others – you still can use DataPipe.

DataPipe uses basic search and replace functions to tweak the
text that is stored in your databases. Whether you know exactly
the text you want modified, want to modify text that sounds like
something specific, want to search for wildcards or particular
patterns, or want to use fuzzy logic to help find typos, your
data will benefit when you use DataPipe.

And best of all, you won’t have to contact your programmer and
negotiate a costly change order when you need to use a different
format for your date fields, or when you need to swap the order
of last and first names. But you can if this is what you need.
You or your programmer can create custom filters using industry
standard scripting languages.

DataPipe requires Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP or 2003, a
hard disk with 15 MB free disk space and 64 MB RAM. It also
requires SQL Server, Access, Informix, Sybase, DB2, Oracle,
MySQL, DBF, FoxPro, FileMaker Pro, Excel Spreadsheets or any OLE
DB/ODBC compliant database.

Isn’t it time your data look and feel more consistent, more
professional, and perhaps even more impressive? When you run a
business, you need all the help you can get. And in today’s
competitive business climate, first impressions make the biggest
impression. And unfortunately, sometimes first impressions are
the key “make or break” determining factor. So make sure your
first impressions count.

About the Author

Cavyl Stewart is the author of "135 Hot Tech Tips for Small
Business Owners." To Download your free copy, just visit:
http://www.find-small-business-software.com/135_tips.php

Article Source: http://www.dailynewarticles.com