Thursday, March 18, 2010
Geeky stuff
I have quite a large collection of books. I went though a very long phase of buying (and reading, mostly) a lot of science fiction books. I have about 1500.
I soon realised that I would encounter a problem when I went book-shopping and that is I would forget what I already owned and buy it again. I needed some sort of catalogue.
And so I created a database.
Of course, at the time I didn’t have access to any of the tools that would have made the job a whole lot easier. I remember the early versions were slow, clunky and horribly convoluted. I eventually had something set up in Access 2000 which did the job but could have been better.
Better has arrived. I have transferred the database to SQL Server and written a completely new and swish front-end in C#.
It looks tons better and is way simpler to use. I can add details for a book. I can assign it any number of authors. I can put it in a series. All that I could do before but now I can check to see if there are any orphaned records (books that don’t have an author and series that don’t have any books).
It’s been very absorbing doing this. I do this sort of thing for a living but this has been for fun. And I’ve not had to write a design or a requirements spec or a user guide. I am the user and the designer and the tester and …
Anyway, it’s been fun but I have nearly finished.
Back to the novel, I suppose.
Labels: Database, Geek, Science fiction
