Unit 9--My SQL and Databases

I enjoyed learning more about MySQL this week. I know that many databases are created in some variation of MySQL, so it was really cool to work firsthand with this complex program. I couldn’t help comparing this weeks exercises with the database project I did in IRLS 515. In that project, we had to make a relatively complex relational database in Microsoft Access.

There is definitely a difference between working in MySQL and working with a GUI-based database program like Microsoft Access. At this point, I prefer Access because all of the different options are visible for me to select, I don’t have to worry about remembering how to name or access something using the command line. Access will remind users the difference between an integer column and a blob column, with MySQL the user is responsible for knowing the difference. Inserting data and moving data around in Access is so easy… I can imagine that MySQL has the opportunity to be more powerful and elegant to manage, but right now its just intimidating because I keep worrying I'll forget something.

I thought that the Joshua Mostafa MySQL videos from the UA CBT site were good tutorials. Sometimes I felt like they dragged, but usually he provided just the right amount of information to have the tutorial make sense without being overwhelming. At other times I felt like he was needlessly withholding information, like why not just say that “char” means “character”? Then he could have explained why specifying character length is important without having users go through the exercise of entering a multi-character piece of data and having it not work.

As a visual learner, I had difficulty remembering that the parenthesis looks like a “<” in the CBT videos. I kept getting syntax errors because I was using < and > instead of ( and ). I found a good MySQL cheat sheet (http://cse.unl.edu/~sscott/ShowFiles/SQL/CheatSheet/SQLCheatSheet.html) so that helped me remember the parentheses. 

I think I will review the CBT videos again and look over the W3 Schools advanced tutorials before moving on for next week. The great thing about MySQL is that it is used so ubiquitously, there are loads of tutorials about it and its various flavors.