[dba-Tech] On coding alone

[Daniel Waters]

Hi Arthur,

Nice Project!  I hope you can help someone with this.

I'd like to make a suggestion on your VolunteerSkills many-to-many table.  The PK should simply be sequentially incremented by 1.  I would do it this way because if in the future you for some reason need to change the PK of the Volunteers table or the PK of the Skills table it would probably be a lot less effort.  I think in general a PK should never be dependent on something that might change.  

In the same table I would also have a field for VolunteerID and a separate field for SkillsID.  The values in those fields would purely match the PK of their corresponding tables.

Somewhere in the past I ran into trouble mixing PK's with other information in the same field so I never do that anymore.  

All the Best!
Dan

-----Original Message-----
From: dba-Tech [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Arthur Fuller
Sent: May 2, 2019 12:56
To: Francisco Tapia
Cc: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues
Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] On coding alone

A preliminary sketch. We have Volunteers, amd Organisations, and
VolunteerOrganisations (since any Volunteer could join several Orgs.
Volunteers have Skills (driver, cook, companionship, etc. That's a table.
The bridge table is VolunteerSkills, whose PK is VolunteerID+Skill.
So far, I am coding this is Base (Linux) and Access. The intent is to give
it away to any organisations interested.

On Thu, May 2, 2019 at 12:30 PM <fhtapia at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Arthur,
>
> Add me in !
>
> Francisco
>
> On Thu, May 2, 2019 at 9:28 AM John Colby <jwcolby at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Tell me about the project and tools.
>>
>> On 5/2/2019 10:31 AM, Arthur Fuller wrote:
>> > There are two schools of thought here. One school is celebrated by Clive
>> > Thompson's book Coders. which made me realise that that as far as nerds
>> go,
>> > I'm in the shallow end of the pool. I have some idiosyncrasies to be
>> sure,
>> > but over the past 40 or so years, I have come to realise that coding
>> > together is better than coding alone; you can see a shortcut that my
>> > initial code missed, a way to save milliseconds off the operation of
>> > interest.
>> > At the moment I'm coding an open-source project for Linux and Windows;
>> it's
>> > about Volunteer organisations. As is my wont, I'm using database design
>> > tools to create it.
>> > I don't like coding alone. I prefer to have constant criticism and
>> > contributions. So if anyone wants to volunteer, I am most happy to
>> welcome
>> > you to the project.
>> > Arthur
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > dba-Tech mailing list
>> > dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com
>> > http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech
>> > Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com
>> >
>> --
>> John W. Colby
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> dba-Tech mailing list
>> dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com
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>> Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com
>>
> --
> -Francisco <http://twitter.com/seecoolguy>
>
>
>

-- 
Arthur
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