Wayne, John, Steve, Cory, and I talking about servers and such. Wayne was showing us some potential time and CPU processor savings if we change the way we query for text-based values. In SQL (database language - structured query language), we use a lot of what are called "Like" statements. This allows us to search for partial matches and includes a number of wildcards to help the search results be more open. Anyways, Wayne was showing us that if we change some of our code and do full text indexing on certain fields, it may be much, much faster to get the same search results. We chatted about that and made a plan to experiment with it.

Some of our biggest tables that have flexible searching are customers, parts (general inventory items), and sub inventory tables. This includes customer look-ups, basic part searches, barcode searches, RFID tag searches, and tons of other flex search options. The goal is to speed up some of those flexible searches by 10 times and make things more snappy. As a note, the new searches would use SQL syntax that did the full text index (settings on the tables themselves) and then use SQL commands of match and against commands to line things up.

As a fun side note, Wayne is using Fusion Reactor to find slow pages and pages that get ran a lot. That data will help us find queries that we can tweak and speed up. Good stuff.

We are trying to get Eric's sales tax aggregate project merged and pushed up to master and then deployed on all servers. We will need Wayne's help for that. Some of Eric's code will require some deep backend database scripts. We'll work with Wayne and Eric to get those pieces pushed up.

After Wayne left, Cory and John were talking about the discount engine and trying to get Eric to help with part of the cart logic and wire-up stuff. The subject then switched to John asking and chatting with Steve, Cory, and I about the Jira boards. We plan on using that product for the time being but would really like to keep pushing on elements of time so that we could do even better project management inside of adilas. We have a bunch of the pieces. It just still needs some loving and may require some tweaks and changes. We want to head in that direction. Steve was mentioning a hybrid solution and working to get the adilas project management stuff, even more up to speed, to help us internally. We really want this functionality, but it just takes time and resources.

We talked about some of our developers being pulled in so many different directions. Almost like being pulled in half (just overloaded). Some good conversation here. As we were switching gears, John was asking and lightly pitching options for a small contribution type project, where his time would end up being translated into a form of investment, into the adilas company. We talked about a few options.

Steve really wants to find something that will help us all out and really provide a good positive ROI (return on investment). We want to keep pushing on more and more of the scheduling and project management (planning) type pieces. We see some great potential for good ROI there, in scheduling, appointments, rentals, reservations, and project management and tracking.