Buteland Systems - Services









		Our business is the re-engineering of commercial data by computer methods. At Buteland Systems we get our hands dirty. We are not in the business of selling you programs so that you can do it yourself. We take your data and return it appropriately processed. Data re-engineering is a skill that takes time to develop. You can benefit by using our skill immediately. Here is a short summary of the more common problems that data re-engineering solves. Character level ASCII, EBCDIC, non-standard integer and floating point fields, case changes. Fields Analysis of all fields, 1 to 1 substitution, max/min values, field verification, data reforming, arithmetic operations, consolidations, counter generation. Records Input: spool, fixed format, delimited. Output fixed format or delimited. Field rearrangement. Printed Reports Transformation into a computer usable data analysis. Systems Reconciliation and error reporting on cross file relationships.




		Any of the elements described in the Introduction section can be incorporated to give a quick accurate service by Buteland Systems for small and medium size files. These can range from deriving delimited files from the print or export file of a spreadsheet with a few hundred cells to correcting upper/lower case fields on a file of 100,000 addresses. Another useful option might be converting multilevel documents such as ledger cards or bank statements to normalised data records.




		Your new system is almost certain to hold data in a form which is SQL compliant. Such a database can be easily populated from appropriate delimited files. That of course is the only easy bit. First, the data has to be obtained from hardware and software that may pay little heed to current practices. Buteland Systems has considerable experience in this basic area of extraction. Reference codes will have to be amended to conform with the new protocols. Fields, particularly dates, must be checked for validity. Relational databases cannot cope with invalid data.




		The Millennium problem does not just consist of amending programs. There is also a data conversion problem. Dates on your database will have to be converted to the new format. If the data field requires an expansion from 6 to 8 alphanumeric characters there will be a change in field positions and possibly the record length. Programs which do this kind of conversion are sometimes known as bridge or bridging programs. A quick and accurate conversion is vital. The modern business requires immediate access to computer systems. No computer system means no order processing which means lost orders. Buteland Systems services save you money.




		A common scenario for Data Warehousing is the collection of many files from disparate systems. Each file will have a different layout and each system will have different codes to describe the same entity or attribute. Buteland Systems provides a service to take all of these files, extract the data, correct invalid fields, substitute common reference codes and output a delimited file or files ready for loading into your data warehouse.


	(c) 1997 Capelaw IT Solutions	Last Edited: 29-Sep-1997