Volume III #21
IN THIS ISSUE:
A D M I N I S T R I V I A
A I V I R T S I N I M D A
Logging
Options!
One of the most common questions we get
is 'who did what?'. Usually this comes about in situations such as 'the big customer'
complains of an improper billing and everyone wants to know, 'Who is responsible for
this?' And of course, there are many, far less dramatic situations which will invariably
come up where you need to be able to audit all changes made to a particular piece of
information.
Standard: Last Revision
Standard equipment with SAFE is the ability to track the Last
Revision Date, Last Revision Time, and Last Revised By for most records such as Customers,
Products, Sales Orders, A/P Bills, etc. For example, you can easily view the last time a
Customer was edited and who made the change from the Customer Browse. In the same way, you
can review the last person to edit an A/P Bill (usually this would be right before a
payment was made against the Bill.)
Logged Transaction SAFExtension
Optional Equipment is our Logged Transaction SAFExtension (LTS),
which keeps a running audit trail of various transactions and records (which you specify).
For example, you can specify that you wish to track 'who did what' for all aspects of the
Sales Order process, but not track edits to Product Specs. A complete set of reports is
included which allows the manager to track changes to specific tables or even down to a
single transaction. For example, this gives you the ability to list every time a Sales
Order was edited and by whom, from creation, through billing and payment.
No Free Lunch!
LTS comes with two costs. The first, of course, is the price: a
measly $299.00. Custom reports may be added at our normal design charge, or you can create
them yourself in ReportWriter. The second cost is in horsepower: as you might
imagine, logging all these actions in such a detailed way would increase database activity
on your server. You're right! And in fact, if you go wild and elect to log all
activity in SAFE, you will probably notice a performance drop of %30-40%. For more common
applications, the performance hit is a more modest 10%-15%. Smaller, but still
significant. So you may want to consider doing all the normal things we suggest for
improving performance: Faster server hard disk, faster network cards, network switches
instead of hubs, etc.
Conclusion
As your business grows, the ability to track transactions and
record updates in a comprehensive way becomes more and more important. LTS gives you this
capability at a bargain price, with the caveat that your hardware be powerful enough to
support the added disk activity. Of course, for the majority of you who will most benefit
from this SAFExtension, this level of hardware should be in place.
Next Time: Advanced
Queries!
More and more, SAFE users are trying
more and more advanced Queries in order to get better and better information. And as they
do, they run into limitations of the Query Window. Next time, we'll re-run a number of
tips on bypassing the Query Window and creating your own advanced Queries which
can run much faster and enable you to extract information from SAFE otherwise impossible
without custom programming. Especially useful for users of ReportWriter!
Web Site Transition
Blues!
This is a tip for all you aspiring
Webmasters (and Mistresses!). After many gripes of poor quality of service, last month we
transitioned our SAFE web site to a new ISP (XO Communications). Everything seemed to
go smoothly, until we started getting all kinds of mysterious complaints that users were
unable to find or download various files. The mystery was solved when we realized that XO
had installed our site on a Unix server as opposed to Windows NT, which we had been using
at our previous ISP. Unfortunately, Unix and NT web servers have many small, but important
differences. One of these is that Unix is CasE SensITive and NT is not. So for example, on
a Unix system, the files Test.HTML and TEST.html are considered different files,
but on NT they are not.
The temporary solution for us was to go through every single web page and file and change all references to lower case, plus create a policy of using only lower case file names from this point forward. This was easier than getting XO to migrate us to yet another server and deal with other potential problems.
The moral of the story: What you don't know about your ISP can hurt you. Get as much information as you can about their services, policies, etc., and check, check, check their work after your web site is up and running.
CIARAN'S CORNER: More On Windows XP!
More 'challenges' you will face in
working with Windows XP, and why we still think you should move to it.
When you upgrade or install Windows XP new, you will be required to register your system with Microsoft in order to validate your license. If you do not, XP will stop functioning after 30 days. This was meant to stop piracy. Now, Microsoft has a valid point here. There probably is not one of you out there who have not, at some point shared your copy of Windows or Office with someone else.
On the other hand, what XP does, is to create a signature which uniquely identifies your computer. The signature is a combination of all the hardware devices in your system. If you upgrade your computer and change enough bits of hardware, you may have to re-register Windows XP.
As we've suggested before, the thing to do is to not upgrade your existing Windows 2000 PCs, but to purchase only new PCs with XP, or upgrade Win98 PCs. The good thing about purchasing new is that you can ask your vendor to pre-register XP so that you do not have to go through the registration process at all. Most PCs these days are not opened for very many upgrades so the three upgrade counter which Microsoft uses seems reasonable (at least at first blush!).
Is all this simply more of the same old tricks from Microsoft that gets them in trouble with the Department of Justice? Of course! They're relentless. But we have to admit that XP is a solid product and that basically, if one can get around the more weaselly aspects of their tactics (as I have been trying to point out over the past few months) then you should find XP to be a significant improvement for your business over Windows 98 and NT.
Cheers,
---Ciaràn
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End of E-News From The Suntower, Volume III #21