Download a pre-configured XAMPP

The past few days I’ve been working with a fresh installation of XAMPP, used for my article Setting up XAMPP to Work With MSSQL. I realized that if you don’t have some experience with web servers, etc., it can be a bit much. What I mean is, I struggled with it a bit, and it’s …

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Setting up FileZilla and MySQL

To fully utilize the capabilities of your reporting sandbox, there are a couple tools in XAMPP that you will need to utilize, FileZilla and MySQL.

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Creating a Ship-to Report in SQL Server Management Studio

The company I work for is approaching its 10th anniversary this year. In that time, we’ve accumulated a variety of ways of getting data out of the system. For a ship-to report, I can run a couple variations from the N screen, or via Access through some of Carol Brown’s near-magic. And I have a …

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Your first MSSQL Report, ‘Flushed Today’

A few weeks ago, I had quite a few orders go sideways on me. The orders that were a mix of wholesale product and items we stock were missing our stocking items from the deliveries. With a little investigation, it seemed the culprit was likely that tickets had been prematurely flushed to status B. As …

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Setting up XAMPP to Work With MSSQL

In this article, I’ll show you how to set up XAMPP on a Windows 7 machine. The process is largely the same on Windows XP, if you’re repurposing an older machine. One thing to keep in mind, though, is the newest versions of XAMPP use a version of PHP for which there is not an …

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A Better Method of Reporting in DDMS

If it wasn’t clear before, I’m a huge evangelist of using the SQL Server for reporting in DDMS. I’ve spent a lot of hours working with DDMS in a lot of ways, and I’ve always seen its reporting capabilities as a huge weak spot. A few years ago, I sat down and got serious about …

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An introduction to SQL for DDMS

By day, I work for a fair-sized office products distributor. The company, like a lot of independent OP dealers, is on ECI’s DDMS platform. I’ve got my issues with the software, but it’s what we’ve got, so I do what I can to make it as painless as possible. By coincidence, around the same time …

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Screen-scraping Addresses from the USPS

As I mentioned in my posts about Web Tools, I wasn’t entirely sure I’d get approval from the Post Office to use the Web Tools servers, so I came up with a plan B. That plan B being screen-scraping the USPS’ website. Like the others, I wrote the code originally in 2010. As it happened, …

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Returning Sales Tax data for Washington State with PHP

Washington State introduced some interesting tax rules back in 2008. Where previously sales tax was calculated at the point of sale, it was changed to be point of delivery. This was a huge distinction for companies that make deliveries. In addition, the state requires tax reporting to be broken down by district. So prior to …

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USPS Web Tools for Address Validation, the tl;dr version

If you just want to know how the hell to get up and past the scripted tests and get on the live server, this post is for you. It goes like so:

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