I spent the bulk of today reading the book on relational database systems, taking breaks to play around with PHP a bit more and to track the storms that have been hovering and swirling around Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas all day on the Weather Underground radar. The book is a bit dense and therefore slow to get through, but I think I’m getting closer to an understanding of relational databases (the first three chapters have only discussed the conceptual end, not implementation yet). Even if we don’t end up using the relational model, and despite the fact that the implementation specifications in the book are specifically geared toward a couple Microsoft database engines which we won’t be using, the book seems to be a great source for general principles of strong database design and has got me thinking about efficient ways of structuring our database. At the end of the day, I read the additional data files Doug put on the server into the mySQL weather database I’ve been experimenting with on my computer, and I’ll be exploring them some more tomorrow.
-Katherine