I haven’t disappeared off the face of the earth. My laptop has been in the repair center for a while (3 weeks and 1 day to be exact). Putting my online life into a bit of a mess with not having Outlook to organize all my email accounts for me. I set my personal email to an IMAP so I could check for important emails but some will have got through as seen as spam.
My last blog was on the spam artist the lowest of all of gods creatures to ever walk this earth. I have just downloaded all my emails from each of my accounts and have a nice healthy collection of around 60% spam (about 900 spam and 200 legitimate emails). So I have just spent the duration of a full to flat laptop battery (Which isn’t much on a Toshiba Tecra A4) replying to emails and sorting out all the junk which managed to sneak through the spam filter.
Right. After the explanation for my absence time for my blog.
I have recently been working with relational databases for a university project which is disappointingly only got a 2.1 for. I wrote an ordering system for solid fuels company (I did a similar project for my A levels but never got it to work in Access which is an awful program). It contained 3 tables and pulled information from all of them allowing the user to add, edit, delete and view all orders, customers and fuels.
At first the use of relational tables was very daunting. I tried to get away without going too far out of my comfort zone but soon found myself grabbing my cyber board and surfing the web for the SQL syntax for JOINs.
I didn’t realize how many different types of JOIN they were and they all do pretty much the same thing but in a slightly different way. Making sense of all of them was going to take a bit longer than the 2 days I left myself to write a fully working ordering system for a solid fuels company. I ended up using INNER JOIN as it only retrieved the data from the right which was related to the content on the right.
W3Schools saved me from my lack of knowledge on tables.
http://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_join.asp
This post may seem random but this assignment made me realize how important relational tables actually are.