[AccessD] Windows can be so much fun

I hear ya! Welcome back to the 99% LOL. Now if I could only find such a
client that would necessitate some serious hardware.

Arthur

On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 10:06 AM, jwcolby <jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com>wrote:

> >I guess JC's in that 1% we're hearing so much about lately LOL.
>
> LOL, I dream of winning the powerball just like the rest.
>
> I actually borrowed $5000 as a business loan from my mother to build the
> first two servers in 2004 in order to get this client.
>
> In the first 16 months I grossed 10K and I was beginning to wonder if this
> client was ever going to "pay off".  I did everything on SQL Server
> completely manually and learned as I went.  SSMS was my biggest "enemy" as
> I struggled to figure out how do do all this stuff.
>
> Understand that while I had recovered the cost of the hardware I was
> spending massive time "off the clock" learning how to do sql server and
> stuff.  I was extremely broke at that point and when the client asked "can
> you do this" I said "YES I CAN!" but hadn't a clue how I was going to do
> it.  I would bet I grossed about $10 an hour those first 16 months on that
> client's work.
>
> I got the client in the first place because his business was with a
> company that gave him bad service.  He was "small potatoes" to this big
> service company and they would take days to give him counts and pass him
> from person to person within the company to service his account.
>
> It was the fact that I did all of that prep and gave the client immediate
> service that caused him to eventually give me all of the business that had
> been with this other company.  In the next three years my gross from him
> increased 20K a year as I gave him what he needed and he placed more and
> more of his business with me.
>
> In addition to all that I took C# and have since designed a custom
> application to automate the tasks that I have to do for him.  Now I
> actually bill for every hour spent and I even bill for "jobs" which take
> almost no manual labor.
>
> Over the years my client has directly paid about 50% of the direct costs
> of the servers.  When I just didn't have the cash for $2K worth of raid
> controllers and disks I asked him to write a check for that and he did.  I
> didn't have the cash for the new server so he paid the up front cost to
> build the machine.  I later purchased additional memory, SSDS and such.
>  Understand that in the end, the client pays for everything, since anything
> that I buy comes after I pay my bills.
>
> It wasn't hard to convince the client that his needs required more than a
> quad core and 16 gigs of memory.  I am doing sql kind of stuff, performing
> where clauses on as many as 20 fields at a time on tens of millions of
> rows, and joining together tables with tens of millions of rows, in order
> to get result sets of millions of rows which get exported to disk as fixed
> width files and csv files.  My poor quad core 16 gig machine was struggling!
>
> SQL Server is incredibly efficient and the more cores and the more memory
> you throw at it the faster it gets.  By moving to compression I decreased
> the size on disk, decreased the disk I/O to get this stuff into memory and
> decreased the footprint of the data in memory so more stuff is loaded at a
> time, but you need processor power to do the decompression as the data is
> used in memory.  16 cores, 64 gigs and compression allows me to literally
> load all of the relevant fields for the tables I am working with and turn
> my system into an "in memory database".  Even then it can take minutes to
> do some of the pieces of the processes I perform.
>
>
> >I guess JC's in that 1% we're hearing so much about lately LOL.
>
> I would say that my client is solidly in that 1%, but I certainly am not.
>  The machines I have are just a requirement of the work that I do, not an
> indicator of wealth.
>
>
> John W. Colby
> Colby Consulting
>
> Reality is what refuses to go away
> when you do not believe in it
>
>
>