PORTCOMMODORE.COM / WANDAHOME.ORG BLOG

Here's some cool links to sites, and a couple videos, read on else you will truly be missing out.

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Doing database for a non-profit can require a higher level of detail on a family than most folk are used to. Here is some basics I have come across over the years, and I know there are even more detailed systems when you get into the education realm. Depending on what you are doing “famly” can mean different things. A lot of the mixing and matching is based on relationships in the family unit. And in those relationships members could be related to multiple families in different roles. So lets go on to my current family record structure. It is divided into 5 tables at the core, with additional depending on needs.

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If you do a search for Unique Record IDs you will probably find several hits, as it is one of the common problems in data application design, many use a serial number or hashed random number with some check to verify that there is not other occurrence of the number in the table… But what if you have a system that will merge data from intermittently connected tables from different locations (aka a distributed/replicated database) What you want is each instance of the database to generate an ID unique enough from its peers so there is no conflicts when merging. WANDA's predecessor faced that challenge as it was written before we had LAN and then inter-office VPN connections.

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There are lots of guidelines for naming functions, objects and variables in PHP and other languages but when I started with MySQL I didnt find one that applied to databases. Fortunately I did one I saw once in an example (I don't remember where) and have added to it.

So here it is:

tablename_fieldname[type]

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A few years ago I had to revamp our database (written in FoxBase), after frustration with Microsoft's FoxPRO (don't trust MS for supporting thier Applications) much research I chose (without knowing it) the LAMP stack, which consists of:

• Linux OS
• Apache Webserver
• MySQL database
• PHP programming language

Also along with those, you have to throw in a few more skills such as HTML web page markup, and now CSS for styling. But the efforts are worth it, all the tools are logical and though at times tough to absorb, make sense and provide opportunity for unimagined success.

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