Company Background

Interview with Jon Chesnut
– IT Manager, Sunshine Village

RET: What is the primary function of your IT department?

Jon: The primary function of the IT department at Sunshine Village is to support and maintain a wide range of systems. We are responsible for the network, along with all ticketing systems, scanning systems, reservation systems, telephone systems and the network and IP telephones. We are also responsible for all of the company databases, which are pre-dominantly SQL Server and MySQL.  RET: How many employees are in your department, and what is their level of SQL expertise?

Jon:  Our IT Department consists of seven people who are predominantly experts in networking and hardware. Although our IT department is not large enough to afford the luxury of a specialist SQL person, most of the members of our team have a basic understanding of SQL. As we don't have in-house expertise, SQL development is often quite time consuming and costly.

RET: How often do you develop SQL scripts?

Jon: Our SQL development needs vary, depending on the season. During the ski season we mainly develop SQL scripts for database maintenance, and for reporting purposes. During the summer months (when the resort is closed), we do projects such as installing new software. Database conversions and migrations are typically required, which involves the development of large and complex SQL scripts.

RET: Why did you decide to purchase Superior SQL Builder?

Jon: We decided to purchase Superior SQL Builder in an effort to reduce our SQL development costs, and to allow our team to develop SQL in uniform manner. It was also recommended to me by a colleague at a ‘Geeks in the Peaks’ meeting.
 

RET: Do you have an example of a recent utilization?

Jon: One example of its utilization is that we had some corrupted ticket scanning data that urgently needed to be cleansed. Using Superior SQL Builder, we were able to generate the desired SQL script and cleanse the data in less than 20 minutes. We had a similar problem occur prior to acquiring Superior SQL Builder, and it took us approximately seven hours to develop the SQL script to solve the problem.

RET: Are you happy with your purchase?

Jon: Very happy. Since we have started using Superior SQL Builder, the time and cost of SQL development has reduced significantly. This has allowed us to respond much more quickly to problems and management requests.