One of the key components of any business is data. While some small sized companies solve their needs with tools like Excel and such, many of the growing and large ones will choose an SQL solution.

Although we are offering consulting on free SQL platforms (like MySQL), we are also developing on the MS SQL platform. One reason for that is popularity, and the other is productivity. Recommending Microsoft's solution is always driven by some business efficiency need (e.g. to automate existing, manual processes).

We are using two major components of the above mentioned SQL suite:

• MS SQL Integration Services
• MS SQL Analysis Services
  

Integration Services (SSIS) is a set of tools we use for Extract - Transform - Load type of tasks. In practice, this means that SSIS drives all tasks when we need to pick up data from various sources (Excel spreadsheets, SQL database tables, text files, flat files, FTP servers, etc).

Once data is grabbed, our custom built solution will transform parts of it, as necessary. For example, one might need a solution where currency rates need to be loaded from an Excel spreadsheet and product prices need to be retrieved from a flat file. Then, information from the flat file needs to be uploaded to a web server with values calculated based on the currency rates.

Additionally, such tasks can be scheduled to happen periodically, or can be triggered from a web page too.

The range of solutions is extremely wide but the main focusis usually:

• process improvement,
  
• process automation,
• risk mitigation,
  
• process compliance.