I'm still around...school post...

Just writing to let everyone know that I did not fall into a black hole, unless you count taking two 3 hour grad school level courses a black hole? If so then I was sucked in way back in September and this upcoming month is already eating up all my free time.

The main reason I'm making this post is to complain about my Database Development class. The instructor is not helpful at all and my current assignment is to make SQL statements.

For example, here is question 3.

Write an SQL SELECT statement that can find all coaches ( first name, last name, and the name of the team that each coach serves) in the city named “Jamesville”.

These are the 3 tables I'm currently using are

CITY CITY_CODE PK
CITY_NAME

TEAM TEAM_NUM PK
TEAM_NAME
CITY_CODE FK
ADDRESS
PHONE

COACH COA_ID PK
COA_LNAME
COA_FNAME
TYPE_ID FK
TEAM_NUM FK

This is the query I wrote.

SELECT CITY_NAME, TEAM_NAME, COA_FNAME, COA_LNAME
FROM CITY, TEAM, COACH
WHERE CITY.CITY_CODE=TEAM.CITY_CODE
AND TEAM.TEAM_NUM=COACH.TEAM_NUM
AND CITY_NAME='JAMESVILLE';

I kind of came up with that after four hours of re-reading the Lessons, my textbook, and the w3school website. So out of desperation I write to my professor saying I'm having trouble and I'm not sure if my code is correct and I'd like to make sure I'm doing it right before moving onto the next problem set, the response I got back was pretty much. "Once you learn Lesson 10 it'll make sense." :( Which was of no help at all! I'd already re-read the lesson mutliple times. I'm not sure anymore if we were already supposed to know how to write SQL queries before this class started because I and only two other people regularly write questions to the discussion board.

This class is pretty much eating up all my free time and I'm now rather convinced that maybe I'm not going to be any good at database development. I have a hard time with conceptualizing the entities aka tables, and the relationships don't always make sense. I don't think it would be so hard but taking a class like this over the internet maybe isn't the best way to learn.

I also have a 6-8 page research paper due on the 17th and I haven't even read any of the articles yet because I've been so focused on all the assignments from this class and it's taken up more time than I anticipated. On the 16 I also have another database assignment to turn in for my Term Project. I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed. But it's sort of my fault for taking two classes in a semester while working full time.

I'm very impressed that people are able to figure this out own their own.

This weekend my goal is to finish this one assignment and start my research paper.