The Economist Holiday Double-Issue
For a number of years, the Holiday double-issue of The Economist has been one of the regular things I have most looked forward at Christmas time. It is one of those reasons that I can say I wish every month, if not every day, had a Christmas in them. There is typically a wide range of long-form articles on all sorts of topics designed to pique the interest of any polymath worth his or her salt. So I started my day with some reading of this year’s edition.
Database modeling
Last week saw me start a new consulting gig where I am being asked to essentially design and coordinate the development of a web-based application. (That’s one of the reasons that I have not updated this site in 2 weeks.)
The first order of business is to figure out the data that needs to be captured and what needs to happen to it once captured. So I found myself doing database modeling in Microsoft Word. I know just enough about the basics to get myself into trouble. So I figured that I would spend some free time before Christmas supper making the most of my LinkedIn Premium subscription and learn as much as I could about relational databases in general, and data modelling in particular. I am there enjoying Foundations of Programming: Databases.