Chris Meller

I’d like to take a moment to make a recommendation to Mark Krawzyck, head of the Networking department at Greenville Tech: For the love of God, reform IST 272, Relational Databases! Why you ask? Oh, I’m so glad you did…

Chapter 1 was a basic introduction to the ideas behind relational databases: How they work, brief historical developments, types, brands, etc. Run of the mill stuff for any class in the first chapter.

Chapter 2 dove right into all the commands you could use in a SQL statement. From SELECT to WHERE, everything including AVG, SUM, MIN, MAX, BETWEEN and HAVING were included in this one chapter. Sure we could have spread this out into a few chapters, focusing on the different parts of a SQL query, but why bother? Waste not, want not!

Chapter 3 dealt entirely with crap. 30 pages of 100% grade A steaming piles of crap. By comparison, we only spent 40 pages talking about the entirety of a SQL query. From concept to perfection in only 10 more pages! We start out by defining 11 seperate terms, including 2 types of dependencies and 5 types of keys, but that’s fine by me. Hey, a class needs vocabulary to confuse you, right? Then we start to get a tad out of hand by setting up a table of alternative terminology, because tables, columns and rows were too easy. No, we’ll call them too… mmm, apples! Wait, that’s it… TUPLES! No one will have a clue what the hell we’re talking about! That’ll sure wow those guys at the job interview, and words they’ve never heard of that I say with confidence are bound to bump up my base salary!

From there, we waste time figuring out which fields determine which other fields in a table. Of course that sounds far too easy, so we’ll call them determinants and functional dependencies to make ourselves sound even smarter! We’ll also use this cool little arrow symbol to indicate this relationship that I found in the Wingdings font and which doesn’t exist on any computer keyboard know to man… Oh, and we’ll go on and on with it for half a dozen pages before we throw in some more confusing terms: keys!

We won’t just have one key, and we certainly can’t pick names for them that anyone with half a brain would be able to understand, because we want to make being a DBA a high-paying specialized career! So we’ll throw out candidate, primary, surrogate and foreign keys… Combine some of them, and it unlocks the secret level where you can open the golden chest and turn yourself into a composite key! We’ll also randomly underline keys when we’re talking about table structures, because we’re anti-plain text!

After that, we’ll kick our students in the balls while they’re down! Let’s talk about “Normal Forms”… I know no one’s ever heard of them, and will never actually use them in the real fucking world, but we’ll randomly spit out monologues about our tables being in “Boyce-Codd Normal Form” and people will think we’re magical! And because that wasn’t nearly enough, we’ll call one of these “Normal Forms” that no one is ever going to use a “domain key normal form” (which we’ll also spell “from”, just to make people wonder if it’s really a typo or not!)… Hehe, it’s funny because it’s not a key at all!

We’ll then spend 20 pages talking about how to normalize our tables and remove anomolies! Because if people aren’t intelligent and logical enough to realize what the problem is when we put it in simple Excel-spreadsheet examples, they’re not too stupid to be in this profession! Noooo, there is no barrier level for entry! We’ll just flood the entire market with complete and utter morons who have never touched a computer in their lives, but have read about them in countless totally pointless classes and gotten a certification because they’re experts at taking worthless tests! Thus, we’ll keep real networking nerds from getting decent jobs because their reputations as database administrators have been so badly damaged that the entire industry thinks they’re all worthless morons!

As if all this weren’t enough, now we’ll throw in multivalued dependencies, and we’ll use those annoying ass little arrows TWICE for these, because they’re really pretty and make our textbook look so 90’s!

Chapter 4 will beat the same common-sense logic into the heads that aren’t large enough to accomodate it! We’ll give them examples like this:

PT_SESSION(Trainer, Phone, Email, Fee, ClientName, ClientPhone, CLientEmail, Date, Time)

Then we’ll ask them which fields determine other fields. But since we didn’t actually tell them anything else about the structure and use of the system, they won’t have a clue and will spend 2 hours spitting out 20 different possible dependencies based on various assumptions. Sure “Trainer” could determine all the other fields in the table if they were unique, but it could also determine only Phone and Email if there were: Different Fees per Client, multiple lients per Trainer, multiple Trainers per Client, multiple Dates and Times per Trainer and Client, etc. Nevermind that! No one needs to know how a system is intended to function when they’re designing it. No, we’ll just spit out random meaningless terms and spend hours writing SQL statements that spell out our names in cool ways!

To top everything else off, we’ll tell them “Classify each table according to whether it is in BCNF or 4NF. State your assumptions.” What now? What assumptions? Didn’t anyone ever tell you what assumptions make? Well I already know you’re an ass, but as for the ‘me’, I’m just along for this miserable ride…

So you see Mark, there’s something badly wrong with this class. We’re far emphasizing memorization and common sense logic over actual use and application. I understand not wanting to leave anyone out, but don’t we need to set a point and simply say ‘If you can’t grasp THIS, maybe this job isn’t for you.”? And please for the love of Pete, find a different textbook. Prentice Hall may make some great english and history books, but their technical line needs serious help. The Thomson line of tech-related textbooks is far superior in virtually every aspect I have seen. From logical examples to basic structure and order, they’re 100% better than this Prentice Hall book of toilet paper.

</rant>