Strange Birds and Database Design September 25, 2005
Posted by NL in : General , trackbackOk, I must be a strange bird… I am thoroughly enjoying this database design studying that I’m doing. I started writing a program to act as a translation utility of sorts. Of practicality, it translates one word from one language to another, basically being like my Spanish-English / English-Spanish Dictionary (which I no longer have since I lent it to a member of the women’s cross country team in her last year/semester at Greenville and we both forgot about returning said book at the end of the class… see you can never trust women, which — perhaps — is a reason why I’m still single).
With that behind me now — and all women on the defensive — my original idea for the database consisted of a single table listing the word from the ‘foreign’ language along with it’s part of speech, gender, etymology and translation.
In the process of trying to figure out how to query the database from Visual Studio .NET, and how to use the results, I came across a series of articles, beginning at Visual BASIC and MySQL Tutorial - Part 1. These articles start with database design for relational databases and end in the completed publishable program. As a result of this page and a couple others, my database now has 7 or 9 tables per language, depending on if I want to include inflectional forms or not. Two of the tables are simply look up tables (gender and part of speech); two are reflexive in nature (synonyms and antonyms); two are for congugation and declension. It has become such that I could set the database up to translate between any number of languages.
Perhaps the reason I enjoy this study of relational databases is because they are based on mathematics, even a part of mathematics that I had some exposure to in Abstract Algebra at Greenville College — not that Abstract Algebra was one of my strengths.
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