[PLUG] Database question

Dan Colish dcolish at gmail.com
Thu Jul 2 21:41:37 UTC 2009


On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 2:27 PM, Amy Kelly <engagedtone at gmail.com> wrote:

> Being currently unemployed like most of PDX, I'm volunteering at a
> place called Rosehaven - http://www.rosehaven.org - and besides having
> the grand chance to randomly sit and knit and crochet with some cool
> ladies, there's a project that I'd like to do for them that would be a
> benefit for me and my resume. I've been a support monkey for a long
> time and haven't learned much more than the very basics needed to know
> if something isn't working correctly in a database. I feel like I'm
> not getting as many hits on the resume as I could be and if I knew SQL
> and such better it'd help since most of the support jobs seem to want
> that, and I'd like to go into QA eventually.
>
> Mostly for my own education, I want to set up a database that would
> track names, addresses, contact numbers and email addresses, and hours
> worked monthly and be able to pull it into a report every quarter,
> plus be easier to keep updated than their current paper system. I know
> you can do this all on a spreadsheet and I'll likely draft it that
> way, what I'm curious about is which tools would be good for this as a
> relational database?  I'd say they have between 100-200 active people
> that would be in it with summer kids and practicum students and such
> included. I'm not interested yet in making it into a login-type
> tracking system because I think that would be too much for them to try
> to maintain, but something that the sign-in sheets would be imputed
> into at the end of the day or the week. I don't want to reinvent the
> wheel, but I do want to try to learn how to set this up by myself.
> Thanks.
>
> --
> Amy Kelly // engagedtone at gmail.com
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG mailing list
> PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
> http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug


The queries needed for this type of application would not be difficult at
all. Depending on how you plan to have your interface you may choose
different levels of normalization (ie do you roll up the contact info into
one table or not). As far as your interface to this database, I have read
about using 0penOffice Base to interface with Postgres. That might be an
easy path to success. Otherwise, you can roll out a quick webform that does
a lot of what you need.

--Dan



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