Laurabelle's Blog

Today I learned something about Access. I learned some cool things, like that it will generate a visual display of the tables in a database and their links to each other. This is cool, but it's also annoying, because it means that although I create foreign keys in one kind of window, I have to delete them in another. Not intuitive at all for me, and the one time I had to ask for help, it was about the user interface.

On the other hand, I rather like the database I created. I learned the long way that I really should have planned out exactly (rather than vaguely) what I was going to create, before I started clicking and typing. It's one of those things that's easy to say and hard to do!

The major thing I learned from today is that I now know how to put many-many relationships into a relational database. That's one of the things I avoided when I created my CD database! I didn't know how to deal with it. I still haven't thought about how to code or compose queries for it, but I guess I'll learn more about that later in the quarter.

Today we also got assigned to groups for the final project. There are six people in the group, which is rather big. I think this will be a challenge for me, not technically, but rather because of my technical expertise. I have my preconceived notions about how things should be done, and my group members may disagree with me. There's one woman in particular who is very nice but who has her own strong opinions. We have clashed in the past, and I feel we may clash again, and of course everyone else will have opinions too. Yes, life is about teamwork, and yes, it's also about compromise, but I reserve my right to anguish about it beforehand.