Question

I am writing a scheduling program for my company and I wanted to pull information from our Management Information System to supplement the schedule. The MIS has information on all of the jobs we need to run including due dates, piececounts, operations, estimated run times and other valuable information for a scheduler. I talked to support for the software and they basically stonewalled me. They kept avoiding my questions.

When I forced the issue by having the CEO call them, they gave up the database was a Sybase database and that it was ODBC compliant. Then they me a 500 page document of the data mappings of the database, but no explanation. Looking through it, i can tell a lot of it is just general settings for the software, and i believe i found the tables that store the job information. But i have no idea what the fields in the table are.

I connected to the ODBC connection successful in a python interpreter shell. I did a select * from table statement and i got a crapton of information back. But i dont know what i selected. Is there any way to see what fields im collecting information from?

So Basically I am asking if there is a way to know what information i drew from a table without knowing the field names.

Thanks

Answer 1

If I were the CEO, my first thought would be to buy scheduling software before I’d ask an individual or team in my company to write such a thing. It’s a difficult but important problem. Why would you want to develop, debug, and maintain such a thing? It’s been solved. I’d rather just use an existing solution. Just saying.

I am asking if there is a way to know what information i drew from a
table without knowing the field names.

The field names and types are the easy part. You can ask Sybase to DESCRIBE TABLE. It’ll give you all the column names and types.

But it won’t have any meta-data that gives you business context for what they mean. You’ll have to go back to that MIS group, domain experts, or know the process well yourself to figure that out.