Eric and I checking the sales tax aggregate code. New daily sums per corporation per location. Good stuff. This is one of the first data warehousing and major aggregation of data projects that we have done and/or are working on. Good stuff.

As Eric was going through things, we could see tons of potential and wanting more of everything. Poor Eric, he just wanted to finish the project, but almost immediately, we were already requesting more and more. I've been on the other side of that before, being the developer who just wants to finish his project only to get 50 more requests on top of what is already done and needing to be done. It ends up making it better, but it can be pretty harsh on the developer who is trying to get out from under the weight of a big push or big project. I really felt for Eric trying to protect and finish things up on his project before the rest of us wanting to push it to the moon.

Sort of the old debate between users (I want this and that) and developer (I'm just trying to make it work). Interesting mindsets.

As we were looking at Eric's aggregated sales tax project, we decided to add in a current row to show real-time calcs along with the existing daily aggregates. That allows the report to pull from both pre-calculated aggregates and sums as well as current data for the current day (non aggregated data - as the aggregation routines happen after business hours).

The other topic for the morning was dealing with page templates, guides, style guides, and closing the gaps between what is wanted and what is available. Good session dealing with existing aggregates and mixing in a small piece of current or future fake aggregates to close the gaps on the reporting. A mix of real-time with prior date-specific aggregates.