Financial

Recently we successfully upgraded one of our client CiviCRM install from v2.1 to v3.1.2. Over all I was pretty happy with the CiviCRM upgrade process considering client's db was in bad shape. This client is one of the early adopters of CiviCRM, ( since v1.8 ) that made things bit worse.

Few things you should remember before starting upgrade:

1. Backup your working CiviCRM database

Web-Reporter is used to create Graphical repesentation of the data from the database. This is reporting tool which is useful for quickly and easily building interactive reports from data sources.

Web Reporter is developed using the Zend framework. It comprises of following important aspects.

Web reporter is a graphical development environment used to produce report populated by data from any database. It allows creation of simple reports through graph, charts and text report. Report can be easily created by any user within few minutes.

Every organization uses reporting in one form or another. As a result, reporting is considered an important operation that can allow you to predict your organization's results, if you are good in analysis. This is also called Business Intelligence(BI).

dataspan.in is a unique product. What makes this unique is the fact that it is able to successfully parse 80 ABX deals in their pdf format, extract meaningful data from these files and then create comparative data across deals for several parameters, such as delinquency at a tranche level. It also allows comparison across previous months. All of this within minutes of the data being released into the public domain.

Communication - it starts at home. It is of most importance as it affects your business and your personal relationship too.

Most problems or fights are caused due to mis-communication or mis-understanding. So if some one wants to learn how to communicate effectively, then he should first learn to listen.

Recently I got lucky and was interacting with 2 clients. And got to learn a few things out of the interaction.

Recently a client asked us if we could develop a BI application. Just to make sure that we were on the same page we checked if she would define for us what she meant by BI. She was very clear in what she wanted. What I was not sure of, was was it BI ? Or was it just a reporting application.

RSReporter - an ELTL (Extract Load Transform Load) tool is designed to populate data from various source file types into a database. Validations are run here to give accurate data.

The part where a lot of research was required is the population of data from different types of files into the db with minimum processing time. The ancient method of reading a file line by line and entering into the db would take a lot of time for a file of huge volume and sometimes a error of heap space could occur

While building a POC for a business analytics application which emphasized on faster data retrieval from business driven queries on a large volume of data, we knew we had to think out of the MySQL box. Retrieving data using MySQL, especially when the data is very huge, can take quite long.
 
We had to handle the 0.2 million records. The query involved searching through all of the records and took 15 odd minutes when we implemented it using MySQL :-(
 

Feature: Graphical representation of the reports. 
“Jasper Report” is one of the options that we choose for the graphically displaying reports. Jasper report is implemented with the help of jrxml file which acts as an editor for designing graphical report.

While in a project which involved handling lots of data, we came across an interesting issue. After importing data into our database, we had to validate the data and mark the invalid ones.