MySQL is a relational database management system that you probably hear tons upon tons about but if you’re reading this, you probably aren’t sure how to even begin picking at it. After all, there aren’t even any vowels in that word – that’s overwhelming enough! Well, because I’m only barely a step ahead of you (or in some cases, probably a step behind), I can promise you that it’s really not as scary as it looks. With the foundation laid out by my previous posts, we should be able to tame this beast pretty smoothly. Today we will introduce ourselves and familiarize ourselves with some MySQL controls – not necessarily database controls like we discussed in my initial post, but we’re just going to see if we can get our database to give us some information using a few key phrases.

Just note that this WILL be a bit of a longer post – so feel free to read it in simple segments and take breaks in-between. We’ve got a lot to cover! Read more »

Just like with any design – whether graphical or in programming – you’ve really got to make yourself a roadmap to be successful. Databases aren’t that different. After all, just like with graphics design, they fall into information architecture. That is, the most successful databases are the ones which effectively organize your information.

In this post, I will discuss relationships between information, as well as how to effectively normalize your database so that each table avoids redundancy between each datum. Before we begun, let’s define a few key terms! Read more »

So, what’s the point of having a relational database if we can’t play with the information on it? That would be where our data extraction operations come from. There are two categories of data extraction operators – set and relational operations. Let’s find out what these mean. Read more »

So, in my previous post I went a little bit into SQL code. Well, today I backtracked myself a little bit, and just looked into the basics databases. I stopped by the bookstore, actually, and picked up a few books, including these two:

The Manga Guide to Databases
Sam’s Teach Yourself MySQL in 10 Minutes

The first one I’ve already begun to delve into, while the second has become more of a reference for some of the fun scripts that I’m already working with – that is, a basic Perl script that simply turns my CSV file into INSERT commands that I can simply feed into UNIX to add things to my table.

But anyways, let’s begin recording my findings, shall we? Read more »

So, recently I’ve been learning a little bit at a time about SQL, and I felt that it’d be best to record my findings and really chew on them by writing about them. After all, I’m the kind of person who learns best by regurgitation. Thus, in this post I will explore (and regurgitate) some basic ideas and commands behind SQL and database language, but don’t expect to be programming a database at the end – that’ll come in time.

Understand that this is after a few hours of inquiry – so this post is going to be very, very basic and in a very dried-out format. I realize that my understanding of SQL is not especially in-depth just yet, but here I have compiled some readings I did, and general information that I found through various means. Feel free to correct me, and I will edit the post accordingly (and my notes!) Read more »