Jumped on the morning meeting. Steve and Dustin were on there and so was Wayne. Steve and Dustin opened up a Zoom session and worked on that. Wayne and I worked on a huge database field list with tables, field names, and mapping out of the foreign keys (database columns that link tables together in a relationship). We went over 4,000+ fields during our meeting. Most of the time was spent mapping out what foreign key values where and how they mapped to what primary tables and columns. We saw lots of activity in the payee (users and vendors) table as well as the corporations (worlds or business companies). Good session.

At the end of the session, Wayne showed me a sneak peak at a tool he is calling the Adilas Database Sync tool. It is a C sharp program that compares two different databases and makes sure that they are all synced up. I got excited on a few of the cool and creative features. Here is a small list. For more info, talk and ask Wayne for a demo.

- Super cool idea for comparing records... He would put all of the data together in a huge string (column value, column value, column value, etc.). He would then run a quick hash on that data. A hash makes a small 32 character unique code (really small amount for storage). He could then store that hash value. Then later on, when he was checking the data, he could put all the new data together and re-hash it. If the hashes matched (the two small hash values), no updates were needed and he could skip the record. If the new hash was different than the old hash, he would run the update that know what fields to update. This helps sync the data and also allows the system to skip something that doesn't need any changes. Very cool.

- He setup the whole thing to do non-destructive adding and updating based on using recursive functions (building logic as needed vs doing a, then b, then c). He also built in some options for taking care of the exceptions.

- This new Adilas Database Sync tool will have a huge time savings attached to it. Just a day or so ago, we migrated over 12,000,000+ records for a server to server migration. With Wayne's tool, we could set it up to do the sync even days before the actual migration process. It could run while you sleep and even run over days and days as needed. Then, when you are ready to do the final migration (deep pass over the data), most of the work would already be done and only new updates, additions, and/or changes would need to take place. That is huge. This also opens up possibilities of doing some mirroring and having back-up data servers. Very cool.

- We talked about using this database sync tool for doing for testing... We could copy over specific customer data, code against it, do the tests, and then go from there. Huge options.

- We briefly talked about Calvin's Auto Process Tool and custom code options there. Once again, both of these programs use server-side software to get major crunching power while still allowing for a normal web-based interface. Imagine what we could do if we built some connections between Calvin's auto process tool  and Wayne's adilas database sync tool.

- We talked about how developing server-side software using something like C sharp is so much faster than web-based languages. We talked about how many levels of conversion the code goes through and/or does in order to run it... Imagine ColdFusion code being interpreted by Java and Java be interpreted who knows what, and that being interpreted into system or unit code, etc. You get the idea. There is also a huge difference in the timeout windows and how long process are able to run without manual and/or user interactions.

- We could schedule out long running tasks, report, exports, and/or other tasks. We could get away from web session timeouts. That would be awesome. Sometimes it feels like we are trying to fit the whole world through a revolving door (analogy of trying to hit the web timeout rules).

- We could also use some of the C sharp tools to flip indexes and database column level defaults. Some of these things are text fields currently set to latin 1, could be changed to UTF-8 format. We could change default dates and times from default dates of 0000-00-00 to 1990-01-01 (a real date value vs the generic placeholder) and default times from 00:00:00 to 12:00:00. Once again, we could skip all of the web session timeouts and just get the job done. All good things and it could be done very quickly with minimal clicking and babysitting. That is where the value lies. Good stuff.

Looking forward, I'm not sure what the future holds, but I'll bet that it will have both web code, server-side software, API sockets, and other hybrid type solutions. Each thing is good at a part of the game, we just need to mix and blend as needed to get the different jobs done. Exciting times ahead.