Unit 10

Yes, we are sliding into the home stretch indeed. Thank heavens 'cause this stuff is hard! This week I learned more about databases than I will ever consciously remember. This unit was chock full of stuff to cram into my poor little head. I read all about MySQL and how to grant privileges, do queries, and construct operator strings, etc. Actually I did a lot of struggling during this week's unit. I couldn't log in to PuTTY or WinSCP with my virtual server's host name/IP address. I was so frustrated... PuTTY accepted my U of A log-in but would not accept my virtual server data. I went through the "Resolving Connectivity Issues" handout and everything worked fine according to it. Hmpf. Why weren't PuTTY or WinSCP cooperating, who knows!?!

Then I struggled and struggled to get the right syntax, spelling, host name, blah blah blah, so I could start granting privileges to the primary and secondary users. I used the virtual server command line interface and it took a long afternoon but I finally got it done in the end. I revisited Webmin and had to do a lot rereading to find out how to access it again. Just another hiccup in the road. Most of the time I can't remember what I did last week, let alone several weeks ago. lol

I really enjoyed creating the sample databases and running the queries on them. MySQL seems very easy to use as long as you are very precise. I used phpMyAdmin for the first time and found it rather user friendly. The professor's directions were easy to follow and the tutorials and cheat sheets he suggested were extremely helpful. I am still very fuzzy on the joins though... inner join, outer join... left join, right join... Some of the sample queries we did resulted in empty sets. I hope that was supposed to be the case. The wording of the join queries will take a while to get the hang of.

Compared to the other units in this course this one is comparable to learning about Linux in general. Lots of new information I'd never even heard of before. One of the most troublesome unit was on normalization. I hope next week's topic of PHP and scripting isn't as hard as the previous ones... but I have a feeling it will be.