Methods to Manage/Document "one-off" Reports
- by Jason Holland
I'm a programmer that also does database stuff and I get a lot of so-called one-time report requests and recurring report requests.
I work at a company that has a SQL Server database that we integrate third-party data with and we also have some third-party vendors that we have to use their proprietary reporting system to extract data in flat file format from that we don't integrate into SQL Server for security reasons.
To generate many of these reports I have to query data from various systems, write small scripts to combine data from the separate systems, cry, pull my hair, curse the last guy's name that made the report before me, etc. My question is, what are some good methods for documenting the steps taken to generate these reports so the next poor soul that has to do them won't curse my name? As of now I just have a folder with subfolders per project with the selects and scripts that generated the last report but that seems like a "poor man's" solution. :)
