Unit 10 Assignment 12 Blog DB Pt 2

Unit 10 Blog

This week was pretty nostalgic for me since I constructed a relational database more than twenty years ago. The application I used called ADBM, is still around, with its most recent release 7.4 featuring capabilities for 250 tables per database with 4000 fields per table, those interested can learn more at http://www.maconsys.com/ . Of course the system I constructed is nowhere near that complex. I did get familiar with adding users and setting permissions as I constructed my RDBMS. The GUI features of the 7 series are far more user friendly than the DOS version I used to construct my relational database. I still use the DOS version every day on our LAN as does my staff. The readings and exercises in this unit really made me understand why ADBM has all those very strange rules and constraints that forced me to create fields and properties and links that would work together to do what I wanted the system to do, more or less anyway. For example, The Not Null constraint in MySQL is equivalent to the Required Field in ADBM.

After just a few days of reading and hands on I have a much deeper understanding of what is going on under the hood of my relational database system. Pretty sure that what I did more than 20 years ago, and still use today, would not be held in high esteem by most DBA personnel but hey it has allowed me to retrieve , search and sort data in ways that would otherwise be impossible.

I'm still trying to get my head around the join routines, inner, outer and full so perhaps after reading the activity postings this week some of this will be clearer. When I constructed my ADBM RDBMS I did learn about primary keys that had to be unique and dynamic value tables that allowed me to create brief codes for products that made data entry consistent and fast. I've been told by a succession of our IT guys that my DOS RDBMS is a poor excuse for a DB but I've challenged them to come up with a replacement for twenty years using MS Access or anything else. To date the sound of crickets is an apt metaphor for their response.

As I learn more about DBA I'll be revisiting my ADBM RDBMS and will try to use the lessons learned in DigIn to improve the functionality of the system. Hey, who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks...