I am called back for a second interview on Friday.

Company wants an employee not a contractor. They have a custom system that uses Windows technologies for hospitals to use. Customized PC with no keyboard or mouse, only input is a touch screen and a lightpen to read bar codes. (Sweet, remember my post about Lightpens? This is where they actually use them!) The Nurses scan in the codes, and then use the Touchscreen to print out Crystal Reports to a printer. The device can be on a LAN in the hospital, which at any time might be down. They use an Access database currently, but are working to put in a SQL Server Database. He did talk to me about Alternatives, I told him the strengths and weaknesses of MySQL, but it may not work for what they want. The fact that I looked into competing products that cost less in licensing impressed him because they are trying to find ways to make their product cost less and provide more value. He liked my idea of keeping a cache or mirror of the database on the workstation (another one of my old posts mentioned that), and my other idea of letting the workstations update each other if they cannot get access to the server for an update (Peer to Peer updates).

Problem they have so far:

Some guy wrote the code in Excel about five years ago, they are slowly re-writng it in Visual BASIC using custom DLLs and EXE files. The database is in Access, which is dog-slow for large recordsets. They want someone who has experience migrating to SQL Server, I did that for the lawfirm. With SQL Server they can create stored procedures and views to speed things up. Also SQL Server does better data synching and replicating than Access does. The data will be collected by the workstation and updated to a local SQL Server on their network and then sent to the main system that sells the software to the Hospital for a backup in case their workstations and SQL Servers crash. The firm's server then sends the updated files and data to the SQL Server, which sends them to the workstations. Somewhere along the line, the network can be down. I suggested an update program to create a QUE to see if the other side had completed the update, and then run it every 15 minutes if the update was not finished.

Sometimes the files can get curropted on the hard drive, and they use dial-up software to log into the system to edit the files by hand to fix it. That is if the workstation is functional enough to accept a dial-in connection.

I interviewed with the manager, and the woman who is the current programmer. The woman is getting ready to leave on maternity leave soon, so I would be working with her, replace her for a while, and then work with her again if she returns. My job would be to fix the holes in the programs, and get them to run more stable, and faster. Then document what I did and work with the other developers to improve on the project. It could turn out to be a life-long project.

The manager agrees with me tht lawyers are *ssholes, he even said that to me when he learned that I used to work for lawyers.