Unit 9: Something to Figure Out

I have to admit, that I had a really hard time with this project. I always thought of myself as a very adaptive person. If you put a piece of software in front of me I can learn it if I have enough instruction. When it came to creating an Entity Relationship Diagram I felt like I hit a wall of logic what wasn’t kicking in. Maybe it has to do with my hands on approach, but I just had a really hard time rapping my head around relationships. It was almost impossible to figure it out myself so I searched the internet to find an example close to my database idea and work from there.

So my idea is to make an image database that is based on different types of humor. In reality I really just need a digital asset database example and I found one after searching for an hour or so at Database Answers. There I finally found what I was looking for.

Here an asset has a relationship with its creators, events and format types. I’m not sure what the events are for, but the other two made sense. The format type is connected to two additional tables (recording devices and publishing devise), which is a bit too complicated for my database. 

I was able to take this Entity Relationship Diagram and make my own. It’s not perfect by any means, but I’m proud of it because it was hard to wrap my mind around how it would be written.

Other than that, this week’s concepts weren't that bad. I can see how many would have an issue with Normalization, but after watching MySQL Database Normalization on YouTube the concept finally clicked for me.