[PLUG] Database question

[Amy Kelly]

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