Access SQL Reporting FUNCTIONS and the BLOB for Voyager

Abstract

FUNCTIONS and the BLOB are important to Voyager reporting. Functions are small programs you add to Access SQL queries to enhance your ability to get data from Voyager. One example is for "date" related functions, which include Date(), DateAdd(), DatePart(), Now(), Time(), DateDiff() (and several more). Other useful functions (MID, LEFT, RIGHT) allow you to manipulate string data and to retrieve data that is part of a larger field of data (ie, "Method of Acquisition" value from the middle of the MFHD 008 tag). Finally, I will explain the BLOB is and how to use different BLOB functions to get information that is not part of a pre-defined field. This will enhance anyone's ability to pull useful data from Voyager for circulation, acquisitions, and statistics reports.