This project was executed for a software development house. SDI provided project management, software development and help desk services. The project required enhancing a product which addressed the needs of a Housing Agency in managing HUD's Section 8 programs -- certificate, voucher, moderate rehabilitation and conventional. These Department of Housing and Urban Development funded these programs.

The package is fully integrated with operational and financial modules. It has twelve modules. These include Resident Management, Property Management, General Ledger, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Inventory Management, Purchase, Executive Information Module and Database administration. SDI developed Administrative Fees, Portability, Family Self Sufficiency and Annual Contribution Contract modules.

The system uses Oracle database server and Oracle development tools. It consists of over fifteen hundred forms, four hundred Pro*C programs and three hundred reports. It has more than three hundred and fifty tables. Security is implemented through database roles.

Help Desk service also required remote and onsite database and Unix system administration and tuning.

SDI is currently providing services to a large research organization that publishes data to governmental and private agencies. The organization has multiple projects that require data collection from surveys conducted through out the country and requires construction of derived variables. The data is collected using various instruments by interviewers. This data is captured into a VAX based system named CHESHIRE.

Using an existing SAS interface to the CHESHIRE, SAS datasets are extracted. An application written in SAS using SAS passthrough and SQL Loader loads this data in the Oracle Database. Users are given access to the systems data through Oracle Discoverer or Oracle Browser 2.0. Users construct new variables based upon business logic. SDI provides support in creation of these variables by helping tune these scripts and writing functions and procedures as required. These constructed variables are published as SAS datasets. In future the data would be published on the Web for ease of distribution

This application's purpose is essentially data collection. Interviews are conducted on telephone, and in person. Interviewees are participants in medical surveys recruited through a recruitment process. The Application makes innovative use of record groups in Oracle Forms to take most of the navigational aspects out of the application code otherwise necessary to implement skip patterns in questionnaires. It uses a table to specify rules of skip patterns and tests these rules using record groups to determine items to 'open' for entry.

We are currently supporting a complex software for the Scrap Industry with multiple installations using the Developer/2000 environment. This is a performance tuning as well as bug resolution and software enhancement activity. We have successfully resolved many application and database tuning issues. Typical issues are inappropriate use or lack Indexes, poorly constructed SQL queries, SGA sizing, Network issues/calls and Optimizer modes.

The application required loading of large amount of data into the database. The initial load from another system was also required. The PL/SQL scripts written for the application were resulting in multiple table scans.

By tuning the application code, table scans were reduced by using appropriate indices, resulting in considerable gains in load times. In fact, there was an 100 fold improvement in performance!

Here we tuned the database to improve I/O performance by changing the storage parameters to match the table maintenance needs, stripping the tables and reorganizing the data files to reduce disk contention.

The overall SGA size was reviewed to ensure optimal usage of memory available. The performance gain realized was 10 fold.

The work involves the setting up and maintaining Oracle 7 based databases for the Development Center as well as the Client locations. The Development Center has a modem dial-up connection to Client sites.

It required planning the physical structure of the database, installing Oracle products, configuring the database parameters, sizing the SGA and creating and maintaining database objects. A system for database object configuration management was developed to made administration easier.