Program Title: The Rules of SQL-sitions: Mastering Sierra SQL for acquisitions ILS: Sierra Program Description: The third rule of SQL-sitions is never spend more effort on a query than you have to.
Sierra’s acquisitions data is one of the trickier portions of the database to query, but also one of the most beneficial. In this session we will go over the data structure of orders, funds, vendors and invoices. Learn how complications like fiscal years, posting and accounting units must be accounted for, and review some especially helpful ideas for queries.
Have you ever wanted to quickly search for orders where a grid wasn’t applied? Perhaps retrieve the payment data for an x-record? Or maybe just audit your current encumbrances? If so this is the session for you.
Speaker/ Information: Jeremy Goldstein (jgoldstein@minlib.net
) - Data Curation Librarian, Minuteman Library Network
This link is in the slides too, but to save people from digging through them unnecessarily here’s where you can find the SQL queries referenced in the presentation.
To anyone new or somewhat new to querying the Sierra database, I recommend Jeremy’s slide deck as the presenter notes and slides provide a lot of insight regarding the location of key columns to use when forming joins. He doesn’t simply provide the final query, but walks through the reasoning behind many of the joins required with a trial-and-error approach.
Even if you’re not querying the acquisitions portion of the database, the lessons herein are valuable. The 360+ views in the sierra_view schema can be an overwhelming data model to sift through, even with the Sierra DNA documentation and ERDs.
