Database Challenge
From the Database Community Forum
March 2004
e-Postcard Database Challenge
You've been asked to design the database supporting an e-Postcard site. The client, however, has uttered those dreaded words "oh, we've already gone ahead and done the table". Your mission (should you choose to accept it...): critique/comment on the following table called Postcard:
| Field Name | Data Type | |
|---|---|---|
| MySQL | Access | |
| postcardID | bigint(20) | AutoNumber |
| sendername | varchar(50) | Text (50) |
| senderemail | varchar(75) | Text (75) |
| recipientname | varchar(50) | Text (50) |
| recipientemail | varchar(75) | Text (75) |
| photoname | varchar(50) | Text (50) |
| midiname | varchar(50) | Text (50) |
| greetingtext | text | Memo |
| timedatesent | datetime | Date/Time |
| timedatepickedup | datetime | Date/Time |
| informsenderpickup | tinyint(1) | Yes/No |
April 2004
Fun Access/Data Challenge!
Taking the area code data that you can find at http://www.bennetyee.org/ucsd-pages/area.state.html, without having to do any re-typing, get it into an Access table format. If you need to use one of Access' cousins in an intermediate step, that's okay :-) Post your step by step process here in response to this message. This is no one "right" answer. Please ask if you have questions. Have fun!
May 2004
Putting an Area Code database on the Web
I don't know if you all remember the exercise where we took the area code data from the Web page and put it into Access, but this exercise will focus on taking the data in that Access database and posting it in our own format on a Web site, using ADO and ASP.
Those of you with PWS or IIS on your machines can do this from home/work, but if you don't have either of those Web servers available, you can get a Brinkster account for free (they call it the Educational Plan). [Note, in my best Peter Seller's voice: "not anymore" - Brinkster doesn't do new free accounts now]
So, we'll start with the ADO code because whether you're going to display information on a Web page through ASP or an Access or VB form, you need to retrieve the data via ADO - the main difference with ASP is that it uses VBScript instead of VBA, but we can work with that once the base ADO code is done. I've attached my area code database * to this post - it has one table and one query, based on that table. Let me know if you have any questions! :-)
A Rough Sketch of What We'll Be Doing
Here's a sample of what we'll be working toward (in both ASP/ADO and ASP.NET/ASP.NET). You won't be able to see the ASP/ADO code by doing a view source (one of the infinite joys of server-side programming :-), but you can see that it is possible to pull from an Access database and display information on a Web site.
Oh, and there's a code download link on each page :-)
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