I am starting a new contract with a large medical supply corporation. They are gobbling up smaller (and larger) companies and trying to integrate data from the new companies into the old companies. I won't be working on that side of things. They've hired a team of dba's and analysts to work full time on that, but as usual, business has to go on and people need information to get their job done. That's my job, street level data mining. Problem is my boss and a parade of assistants have been handling ad-hoc data and reporting requests for years and are not good about explaining the existing data structure and it is not well documented. To be successful, I am going to have to get them to focus and feed me small chunks at a time. The data is stored in both a SQL Server and several other Oracle databases. I'm putting together a plan to approach one database at a time, one schema and one table at a time. It's a little intimidating right now, new people, new industry, new vocabulary, etc. Field names never mean what you think and the same fields are named differently in multiple tables. I need to understand what's in these tables and what the relationships are, etc. Any advice or sympathy would be appreciated. I'd like to help this guy, and myself. I'm not sure if he's thought this thing through. Suggest away. I'm going to start by polling my coworkers and see if they can show me around a bit. Just putting this in black and white has helped.

I'll be doing some of my work using Access as a front end, the rest using TOAD. Oracle has changed a bit since I last worked with it, so has TOAD. If you know any good resources, please share.

Thanks,

Paul