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Database Application - Introduction
One of my pet peeves about the canned training programs typically offered by vendors selling training to organizations is the nature of the examples they use. I mean, if you are going to bill a state government a few hundred thousand dollars for a course in using Microsoft Office, you would think that you could afford to spend a little money customizing your samples to your target audience, right? How many Christmas card lists does a state agency need to maintain? People tend to pick up on things when the examples correspond to the environment in which they exist. At the same time, I don't have much of an idea of just what it is that you are doing. Further, I would like to use an example that we can extend in some non-trivial ways. As I discussed in the section on setting up postgresql, the postgresql system gives you the capabilityt to write stored procedures in either the sql dialect native to postgresql or in perl. Out ideal example would therefore have some reasonably complex associated actions that we could define as stored procedures, so we can work through doing that. Since we also have hylafax installed on the cluster, it would be good to have some factor built into the application that will allow us to set up mass faxing so we can work through that one. After thinking about that for awhile, I decided that a pretty good candidate is tracking the games of a baseball league, and faxing summaries to the managers. The nice thing about this application is that it is reasonably adaptable and extendable. In fact, if you start right now you can probably have a system up to calculate bowling league averages this winter, right?
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