Bruce Gilham Jr.

All work · Commerce & services

We Buy Cars / Used Car Club

Arrived on broken SQL replication and a data warehouse losing rows; stayed six years to replace the Access system the business ran on.

Years
2013–2019
Sector
Used-vehicle wholesale
Role
Sole developer and database rescuer
Outcome
Still running

What was wrong

A used-car buyer's reports were built on a data warehouse that was silently losing rows, and the floor ran on an unstable Microsoft Access system where two buyers could overwrite each other's work. The old system's habits had been designed into the data itself.

What I built

Fixed the replication first. Then built the production system as a desktop client over a web-service layer, following the work of the floor — quote entry with make/model filtering, appointment board, purchase and inventory detail, vehicle expenses, SMS conversations, and record locking. Rebuilt their messaging onto Twilio with push refresh.

What happened

Traced the firm's worst recurring outage to a scheduled job masking expensive SQL that was periodically driving replication out of sync — which meant the reports had been built on data that was neither live nor complete. In daily use through the last exchange.

Stack

LightSwitch Microsoft Access C# SQL Server SQL Server replication Twilio T-SQL

Have a system like this one?

Tell me what it does, what it is written in, and what breaks when it goes down. I will say plainly whether I can help.

Tell me what it runs on