No, not November 5, 1955, which of course, is the day Doc banged his head on the sink and came up with the idea for the flux capacitor. No, in fact my red letter day in history ( as far as this blog is concerned, anyway) is March 13, 2011- the day Forty-Two was born.
In two+ years, this database hasn't grown a great deal, but it sure has matured. It started out with a simple basis of some basic tables, and, as experience grew and normalization was constantly (I hope) applied, it grew to where it is today. As I am the chief cook and bottlewasher of this database, it's been grown slowly and hopefully with a great deal of precision. I am completely responsible for garbage in/garbage out.
I took a look today, and was surprised to see t was over two years old! In that time it has actually shrank, as one of the tables with fixed data was cut down by ~84%. This is good and bad- good, in that the database is smaller and more efficient; bad, in that I have a smaller dataset to brag about!
So, today's blog is pretty much all database... what a concept for a blog based upon a database! I spent about ninety minutes on data entry today, concentrating on updating Blu Ray movies which we own. In the ninety minutes I counted as data entry, I was able to enter twelve movies into the database. Let's see, that's one movie every 7.5 minutes. For what it's worth, I do type quicker than that. There was more than one reason for the high average input time. Access gave me some fits on some data that had been previously entered, but which was now not recognized. Two or three of the records experienced this glitch, where a value (record) in one table was not recognized in another table. This was disconcerting, as I could open the originating table and clearly see the value, but when I tried to enter it into target table, it did not show up as a valid value. I do not know how I fixed this, however, as I rapidly deleted, closed, opened, saved, etc. until something worked. The only thing the "problem" records had in common was spelling similarity. I was updating movies, and the two that gave me issues were "Red" and "Paul". Both of these were entered after similar titles, "Red Dawn" and "Paulie". I think in the end I deleted all of the problem records and reentered them. I think I've seen a glitch similar to this in Excel before, but it was a first in Access.
My main table now has 843 records, which is twelve more than my last count. I'm not a huge fan of (doing) inventory or data entry, but today's work was quite satisfying. Additionally, I've added a URL field to one of the tables, which looks to be quite the promising addition.
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.
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