Unit 10 Tables are Zen

It took a while for me to realize that right and left joins are more about the output of the data rather than some 'floating' table that happens to be right instead of left. I have to admit that most of what we’ve been learning has been challenging, but I’ve really enjoyed the hands-on exercises from this week’s unit. I also like that mysql is a language comprised of statements and Boolean expressions, and how you can break up a statement by clicking enter. Sometimes I am premature in pressing enter, and with mysql it is nice to know that by pressing enter I’m not activating a command but just breaking it up. The semi-colon is like the period at an end of a paragraph (it feels that way too, as the inner joins pack a lot of instructions into one statement).

Conceptually I think that learning about tables & mysql is easier to understand than some of the information in earlier units because of the ability to easily visualize the concepts. With the unit on Networked environments, for example, I felt that I had to have a lot of the concepts spelled out for me in order to understand, whereas with tables I think that I’m so used to functioning in a work environment comprised of information in tables that these concepts were much easier to grasp.

Thinking of different queries to run during this week’s query exercise was a challenge but also a lot of fun. Especially when the joins differed from those in the assignments (and especially when the queries worked!). I think I’m coming closer to understanding the difference between a primary key and integer, or in the language of mysql, an int unsigned not null auto_increment vs. an int not null.