Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Wed, Oct 08, 2003 at 10:58:24PM -0400, Alan MacHett wrote:
> greetings all,
> 
> the short of it:
> On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being HTML 1.0 and 10 being ... well, I don't
> know what 10 would be, something like C++ maybe?, ... what would be the
> rating for the learning curve of mySQL? ...to become a basic
> user/operator/manager/whatever.

Most people I know can't even do HTML with any sort of sense, so I'd
rather use guitar as an example. 

If you can take your guitar and fetch it from its case, that's a SELECT.

If you can tune your guitar, that's an UPDATE.

If you can put your guitar back in its case, that's an INSERT.

If you can dash your guitar against a speaker in Townshendesque mock-rage,
that's a DELETE.

If you can make a guitar, that's a CREATE. You sort of have to know what
you're doing, and how it will be stored/fetched/played and maybe even how
to make it impervious to Townshends.

All database work, as an old co-worker once told me, amounts to either
"curdles" (Create/Update/Revert/Delete/List) (and there are far more
complex forms than MySQL supports natively) or designing the system so
it can all be done faster or more efficiently.

If you can play something easy, like anything John Prine ever wrote, with
three chords and maybe a run, that's like a simple query, say "SELECT foo
FROM table ORDER BY bar".

If you can play something moderately difficult, like say Mike Cross doing
his jacked-up hillbilly bluegrass version of "Greenshields", that's like
a moderately complex query involving indexes and JOINs.

There are harder things, such as repairing a database, optimizing it so
it will run faster under heavy load, etc. but like guitar repair, you'll
likely never have to deal with them, and there are experts around in the
event of an emergency. And MySQL doesn't support the really weird stuff,
anyway.

If you can think clearly and logically, you can design a reasonably good
basic database in a couple of hours without much training. And the MySQL
docs, while sometimes obtuse, are actually pretty good overall.

Steve

-- 
hesketh.com/inc. v: (919) 834-2552 f: (919) 834-2554 w: http://hesketh.com
Book publishing is second only to furniture delivery in slowness. -b. schneier