I come from a different world in my company, I’m not IT though I have formal training, I speak the lingo, and wear the uniform of Jeans, t-shirt, glasses and ton’s of geekieness in my swagger. I’m what they call Business Intelligence or better known as Shadow IT.  Though i’m up front about what we do and the impact it has. In my company I’m the middle person between what the business thinks it wants and what it really needs long term. Most of time what they really want is a short term solution. You know something quick and dirty to fix the bleeding of money and correct behavior.

So in response to Steve Jones T-SQL question of the week “What issues have you had in interacting with the business to get your job done?” For me it all boils down to communication. If I’m not understanding what the issue is then I can’t deliver what they want. But after fully understanding what it is they’re asking for and making sure they’re aware of what they are asking for. I can begin to focus how to impact the issue without investing a lot time, money, resources, and the long term strategic goal of the business and address the problem.

Last Friday I got a data request from a group asking for a report to be generated bi-hourly for customer request that were not responded to in a time span of two hours. So looking at the data I noticed that there were two columns that were time stamped one when the request was submitted and another when the request was completed, so this was easy I filtered out where the completed data was null and wrote a where statement using a Datediff syntax to breakdown the input date time stamp by hour and then subtracting two so my sql statement looks like the following example.

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SELECT recID, inputDateTime, customername, phonenumber, address, emailaddress, requestcomment
FROM      dbo.VIEW_CustomerOrders_SCRUB
WHERE  (DATEDIFF(hh, inputDateTime, GETDATE()) = 2)

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Now if you wanted to change it up and make the date two days instead of hours you could easily change the hh argument to dd and so fourth. On the MSDN page from Microsoft they do a good job at covering how to use the datediff arguments to get different results. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189794(v=SQL.90).aspx