MiSQL es su SQL

I'm surprised at the rather pleasant experience I've had with MySQL. I learned to do a fresh MySQL installation, set up users, and load a particular database almost three years ago, but until this unit I never really knew what it was I was doing. I wasn't the creator or the user of that database, and its tables and relationships are completely opaque to me (or they were - now I know how to look at them without fear of disaster).

I do find the more complex queries difficult to wrap my head around. Something about the terminology of right and left joins is unhelpful in constructing my mental model of what a query's results should be. The simple tables we set up for these assignments may not have the characteristics that would demonstrate the concepts best.

The handling of null values also stumps me a bit - I don't really understand what the consequences of having or not having a null value are, beyond perhaps triggering a 'must have data' condition. In my wee database experiment, null understanding also tangled with some misconception about how default values should work; these issues are probably the tip of the iceberg for continuing database research.

The really interesting thing is that I'm kind of looking forward to it. I would never have guessed that I'd find database work fun, once I was beyond GUI-based software tools that are supposed to make it less onerous. Maybe I just need to see the bones of a system before I'm happy.

This late, late post has been back-dated to keep things in order.