The most difficult part for me this week was learning the
system of notation in the ERDs and trying to develop a sensible ERD for my own
database. That said, I’m really, really excited to learn about databases and
relational databases which I first heard about in the summer of 2006 but had no real idea
about until recently. At that time I was working for a plastic surgeon’s office populating a
Cumulus visual database with before and after pictures of his variety of
procedures (URL available upon request). I think the manager was going to
create this database and administer the website with Drupal, another
application I am just now getting to know in a functional manner.
A few weeks ago while emailing a friend who is a retired
programmer (retired at 33 because he made a fortune) and he told me “It’s all
about the db's, man!” I am realizing that yes, it is all about the db's and pretty much any web
service or social media site is going to be entirely driven by users accessing
servers which call up content from databases (and I guess the content in the database is
managed by a CMS). So this is the stuff we will really want to get to know if
we are going to be useful. So that's a real motivator.
Oh another hard part was figuring out where I had downloaded
MySQL because I now have three servers in Ubuntu-land and had run the apt-get
command from the virtual server, but for some reason the application downloaded
to Virtual Machine #1.
No wait, the hardest part and something I'm not sure if I have fully comprehended this correctly was the Third Normal Form. I get the first two forms, and I comprehend the concatenation thing of folding two rows into a single entity. However, it seems that a lot of people have been trying to explain a lot about databases because you can find a LOT of clips on Youtube attempting to explain parts of databases. Oh yeah, I worked as a contractor as a project coordinator at Oracle from November of 2006 to February of 2007, I would have hoped to have picked up database knowledge by osmosis, but I guess that doesn't happen, not even if you've seen Larry's helicopter land on the campus. And no, they didn't play "Ride of the Valkyries" over the PA while that happened. However I stand firm, the Third Normal Form was the hardest thing for me. Maybe Fred Coulson can set it to music? Well I just ran a search at Youtube and got over 10 pages of results for "Third Normal Form" and most of them actually do look like they are referring to RDBMS's, (as opposed to being about dogs on skateboards or cats on pianos) so I know what I'll be doing tonight...
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