Entries from June 2009 ↓

Some of the data I’ve been dealing with lately is in Microsoft Access databases (.mdb files). I’ve been surprised with the lack of support for manipulating these files outside of Access. There are a couple solutions, but nothing satisfied me needs. The worst data set came to me in a few hundred different .mdb files. It looked like the person that exported the database exported a copy of the database for each unique facility. So each facility had a file, but the schema for each file was exactly the same. It was apparent that in order to do any sort of complex queries on the data, the files would have to be combined. I was recommended a tool called mdbtools by somebody at a local Ruby meetup. I ended up using this along with Ruby inside of a Rake task to convert all my .mdb files into a single MySQL database. Continue reading →

The content of my main web application, Myhealthcaresource, will contain more than 15000 detailed financial reports for nursing facilities at its future peak.  Each of these reports contains textual information as well as monetary values.  It might list administrator names, employee names/salaries, owners, products or services purchased.  I wanted to have all of this information searchable on Google, without Google caching the page.  I also wanted to let users who came from Google as a result of searching for this information see it without having to log in, but only the page that they found through Google search. Continue reading →