Day 1: From a spreadsheet to a database

Our agenda for today is given below. Will we finish everything listed here? Only the future knows. But we've laid some plans to ensure we can use our time together wisely.

Ready?? Let's go!

Learning Objective

at the end of today's class, you'll have a two-table relational database!

Agenda

1. Introductions

Please share something about yourself with the group so we can begin to work together!

2. Get Ready

If you've completed the first steps you already have some language material in spreadsheet form. This will form the basis of your database.

If you don't have your own spreadsheet, feel free to work with ours! Here's how.

Tip

Please make sure that your spreadsheet is backed up in at least two places that live on different hardware. For example, you could keep one copy on your computer and another on a thumb drive; you could keep one copy on your computer and another on a friend's or colleagues computer; or - if you're OK with having your information in an email or cloud backup system - keep one copy on your computer and email another to yourself, or on Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, in Dropbox, Box, or a similar area.

3. In-Class

We'll begin together with tutorial 1 🚀

When you're done, you'll have a spreadsheet that's divided into two tables.

At that point, you'll be ready to create your database, in tutorial 2 🚀

When you're done with that, you'll have a database ready to go.

Then it's time to read your information into the database tutorial 3 🚀

And then we'll be done for this first day!

4. Our Notes

We've got a set of notes that explain many of the concepts we're learning by working through today's tutorials. You might find them useful, but you don't have to use them if you don't feel the need.

These notes include:

• Why use a database?
• How to prepare your spreadsheet
• Defining your columns
• Identifying required vs. optional columns
• Creating primary and foreign keys
• Meeting Structured Query Language
• Other terms and concepts including discussion of data normalization, encodings, character sets, case and collation sequences.

Have questions or need help?

You can contact John, Gus, or Amy and we'll do the best we can to help!

Next Steps

Check your understanding of the content by completing the review activity for Day 1.

You are officially ready to continue on to Day 2. 🚀