Tools I used to use daily to support one product or another
I used to get emails containing lists of hundreds or thousands of record ids that needed to have something changed or done in the SQL database. This app will take that list and turn it in to a WHERE clause or whatever. Ended up saving me tons of time.
I would also get csv files or worse containing an unknown number of records that I would need to import. This tool would quickly give me an idea of how much data I was working with.
Once upon a time a batch process went sideways. The end result was that every hundred milliseconds or so it wrote an error file to the local harddrive. This went unnoticed for months... When it was finally discovered the number of files in that folder was far FAR beyond what Windows could handle. This was either an WinNT or Win2000 box and any program like file manager would just crash when attempting to access the file structure. I did not write this rogue process, but I did have to clean up the mess. I built this tool to simply go in a remove that folder from the file allocation table. Problem solved!
Once I got a zip file containing about 6000 files. Each one with data that needed to be imported. The problem was our automated import process was expecting files named like .pam, but this paticular batch of files was all named .pan So naturally I had to rename them!
Once upon a time I had to deal with a bulk import process that grouped batches by their file date/time. Files with different date/time stamps ended up in different batches. Business rules required all realted files to be in the same batch. It worked pretty well when only one or two files came in as they were small and usally all got the same date/time stamp. The problem was when lots of files came in and ended up in five or six different batches. I wrote this tool as soon as I realized how the process worked... It's been about a decade since I delt with this process, but I am pretty sure if I met the person who designed it on the street today things would not go well for him/her.