Yet another Year

This year was an eventful year for my Data Warehouse. A new guy Hans Mattson stepped in to help me running the Data Warehouse. In no time Hans became proficient in running the Data Warehouse, with his extreme analytical skills he solved some very complex problem we faced. 'You know I'm curious, I want to know how things works' he used to say. Unfortunatly his previous employeer realized how much they missed him and gave him an offer he could not refused. I'm happy for Hans, but I miss the almost daily chats we had about IT in general and Data Warehousing. Hans is more than a good IT guy who know his craft, he is also a very nice guy to work with.
(A new promising guy have just stepped in to replace Hans.)

I have started upgrade the Data Warehouse from PHP 7.4 to PHP 8.1, (the plan is to go to PHP 8.3). This turned out to be tidious and much harder than I had anticipated. PHP is not very PHPish anymore. All the nice features/defaults I used to silently take care of conversions, bad and buggy code now issues tons of warnings, deprications and errors. This upgrade takes a long long time, eventhough the code in general is pretty good and well documented, sometimes it is hard to remember the reason behind code written in PHP 4 twenty years ago. Upgrades to new PHP versions have been simple until now, (PHP 7.4 forced me to rewrite the entire SAP interface, apart from that very little problems). This time I will remove not only errors, but depreciations and warnings as well.
This year we upgraded MySQL to vs 5.7, next year the plan is to upgrade to vs 8.

Other things.
After years of procrastination I have now almost finalized Rey Valeza's D language web tutorial. It is a really great web programming tutorial, if you are an experienced programmer without 'web experience' and like to get your hands dirty this is a tutorial for you. Next I see if I can find a D language tutorial on creating a 'bare metal' program. I want to be a D programmer, I am not today, I cannot even read D code.

At last a happy new year😊

Import SAP data into MySQL with little effort

 This morning I stumbled upon a SAP import script written in my Integration Tag Language. The script is a little gem, it is probably written about 2008.

The script includes all code needed exporting data from a SAP rfc function into Mysql (including defining an import table in Mysql. I have removed parts not necessary for showing the complete export process from beginning to end.

The script starts defining  the workflow, run time parameter and symbolics:

(The run time parameter sap points to a SAP system.)

Next we have two jobs truncate & getSapData:

1 Truncate the result table if it exists (only for full load)

2 GetSapData (the little gem)

This job is packed with relevant and succinct logic for SAP data extraction.

(I added some comments for your convenience.)

That’s it.

The script is a complex parallel process expressed in concise and well defined code.

I have not written the script myself, but I’m proud of the Integrated Lag Language (ITL) which I wrote in 2006 that makes this script possible.

If you have a better way of importing data from SAP, please drop me a note.

If you are the script author you must give me a call🙂

Sevetieth birthday

Somethings you cannot avoid like haveing your sevetieth birthday. I just had mine, I just pretend it never happened.