Have you attended TLCC before and thought about presenting? Have you presented in the past and just love doing it so much you want to again this year? Do you get flop sweats just thinking about presenting but want to push your boundaries and give it a try? Now's your chance. My name is Christopher Cuhel with The 5th Avenue Theatre and I'm part of Team IT with TLCC planning committee. We're looking for some of you who might be interested in presenting on "Advanced SQL, Scheduled Jobs, and Automation". I know many of you are doing some pretty amazing things on the back-end side of Tessitura to make everyone's life at your organization just a little bit easier. Why not share that knowledge to some of your closest friends? We promise to make it a fun experience and be there to help you along the way. If you're interested, don't hesitate to respond to this forum post. My fellow co-planners Chris, Monica and I would love for you to join us.
Chris Cuhel
Database Coordinator, The 5th Avenue Theatre
Last year I built a utility report to manipulate the Tessitura Report Server into running a whole series of "Reprint Posting Report"s and saving them to PDF for me. So twice a month, instead of running a report, saving it to disk, and giving it a name 15 times in a row with different parameters, now I run the utility ONCE, do something else for 15 minutes while it churns out a bunch of PDFs, and then do a one-step batch rename using the utility output.
More recently I also built what I call the "Business Rule Validator" report, which provides a framework for writing your own checks and validations on ticketing configuration, data entry, or anything else you can think of that is represented in the database. (Some examples I use it for: making sure group order CSIs are being created as per our business rules, check for appropriate usage of eaddress types, watch out for duplication of external database IDs stored in a const attribute, make sure ticket designs, GLs, and price types are configured correctly.) Some of this stuff you could do with constraints and triggers, but you shouldn't add those to non-local tables, so having a routine procedure that runs every so often is the next best thing. The procedure also includes an "abort if empty" parameter, so if you schedule it nightly as PDF to email, you can suppress empty reports and only get notified when there's actually an issue. (Of course, that's another thing you're not supposed to be able to do with the Report Server...)
So I guess if you're interested in a "Making the Report Server do things it wasn't designed to do" session, I might be able to help out. :-)
Oh yeah, and one other cool thing I figured out a few months ago was how to have a stored procedure send notifications to a Slack channel. No CLR/.NET, just OLE Automation procedures! Useful for waking me up when the Report Server stops checking in!
Oh right, and since using the entire Impresario database like an API is kind of dangerous, I wrote a PowerShell script to help me get all of the core DB objects into source control so I can see what code and data structures are actually changing from impresario version to version. Useful for finding things that _will_ break in an upgrade before they actually do!
Hi Chris,
I've been away for a few weeks so only just saw this. But I wrote a routine that runs some daily "idiot checks" on Tessitura and sends me an email if anything is fallen over. I could present on that (if it doesn't clash with anything else I'm doing).
You can email me on matthew.hodge@sydneysymphony.com (assuming it's not too late) if you still need help. Will completely understand if you're all sorted.
Cheers,
Matt