The winner of the DevShare Contributor of the Year for the period June 1, 2009 through December 31, 2009 is Huw Bradfield for his contribution to BIRT Exchange titled: Browse a Database with BIRT.
Huw said, “My DevShare entry is a tutorial and report design for a browser based database viewer, designed to provide an easy and intuitive method for non-database administrators to view entire database tables as well as to find specific information without requiring extensive SQL knowledge. I was given the task of simplifying the existing system for finding and diagnosing errors in the Websphere MQ based system at my workplace. In a typical day there will be 10 to 15 thousand entries added into our databases, with perhaps 1500 exception entries and no easy method of finding these errors.
“While existing database log browsers exist, research showed that none of them were ideal. They either gave too many privileges to the end-user (write access), were too complicated, did not have the correct functionality or were too costly to implement. We chose to use a Business Intelligence suite instead of writing a custom web-app so we could leverage the other capabilities such as standardised reports and charting.”
Huw is a Middleware developer specialising the Websphere MQ and Message Broker software line, although he recently transitioned to a web-development role. Huw has only been using Business Intelligence Tools for 5 months and BIRT for 4. Beyond writing and extending the log browser he has written a number of other standard reports to display performance and error summary information. Huw is currently waiting for Integration and UAT testing to complete before he transitions back to BIRT development and future work will probably involve integrating BIRT and the log-browser into a custom web-based administrator tool for message broker.
For his award, Huw will receive a gift certificate to Amazon.com worth $250.
Congratulations Huw!
The monthly DevShare contest rules and list of previous winners can be found here.
