Joe Maus

Session Info

Independent Consultant

Joe Maus has been working with Studio since his hand written version 1.2 CD from Blyth showed up. Before then he worked in Omnis 7 using it since 1990 through 1999 when he left Lockheed Martin's Astronautics Mission Success group to lead a team of PeopleSoft developers in a payroll conversion project. One thing lead to another and he departed Lockheed Martin to start his own firm in 2000. Since then he has grown the business to include 2 additional staff members and expanded the expertise of the firm to include DICOM, LeadTools, and HL7/ADT technologies deploying server solutions in multiple heathcare environments.

Of course, all of these applications need to store their data somewhere and for that he likes to use Oracle and Sybase. Most recently he was working with a large firm in the Denver area where he assisted in the development, testing, and deployment of a comprehensive business intelligence application using the Studio WebClient product and Oracle to provide reports to sales people and managers (including the executive staff) of sales performance, ranking, and daily work of all sales people sliced and diced multiple ways. This was accessed by over 1000 staff - usually daily. This work lead to some intensive Oracle analytics use as well as performance and tuning experiments to make the application run as quickly as possible. In addition, he's still involved in another Studio vertical that uses Oracle which involves supporting over 30 Oracle servers across the US.

Other services that his firm offers include telecommunication billing audits and reselling telecommunications services, firewall and VPN setup/configuration/support, and configuration, sales, and support of HP equipment to the small and medium business community.

Session Info:

SQL 101 - updated for 2010

As a group, we'll take the journey from what SQL is to actually writing and understanding SQL in a manner you can review for yourself after the conference.

You'll be writing SQL from within Omnis Studio while building a small application to list and edit a small accounts receivable application. The main structures will be provided for you so you'll have a small framework to work from. It will handle many of the typical day-to-day needs of a SQL enabled application.

You'll write and code the SQL into the Omnis application/framework so you can see how the session to the database, your code, and the pre-built foundation framework work together to make Studio a very quick development environment. We'll introduce the Model-View controller paradigm and how that is implemented in the foundation framework.

You'll use the framework to interact with the database, including coding schema and overriding default table classes, and, of course, using it to allow the windows and reports of the application to do what they need to do too.

However, we won't be dwelling on the particulars of the foundation framework as this is a course geared towards learning SQL. The goal of introducing the foundation framework is to provide you a working understanding of connecting and accessing a database from within Studio AND being able to see your SQL actually doing work in a Studio application.

On our journey we'll cover these SQL concepts:
* Differences between Omnis DML and SQL
* Table creation, table and column maintenance
* NULLs (my personal favorite...)
* Grouping data
* Aggregate functions (count, min, max, sum, average, etc.)
* Details to consider for deployment of a SQL solution
* Relational database concepts (entities and relationships, keys, integrity, etc.)
* Views
* Transactions
* Inserts, Updates, and Deletes
* Outer joins
And, of course how all of this is setup and managed within Omnis Studio

When we have completed our journey you'll have a solid grasp of what you can do with SQL and how to code an application for maximum robustness and back-end performance, no matter your choice of database. In fact, we'll discover a way to support any back-end natively within the foundation framework's SQL paradigm we build together.

What you'll need: Studio version 3.3.3 (Development Kit) or greater with the FrontBase DAM installed on your machine. A ssh client is suggested but not required for alternative database access (simpler to cut and paste into the ssh client window than it is to do the same into the Interactive SQL tool in Studio - IMOHO...). I am not sure if all the various flavors of Studio now available will allow FrontBase access though - so you MAY need the full kit depending on when you purchased your license and what version of Studio you are running.

As well, a good text editor is suggested for the course. I use UltraEdit on the PC and BBedit on the Mac (other tools are available as well). These tools will allow you to easily and quickly edit your work for the exercises and are FAR more useful than say, notepad.exe.

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