Task 2.1

Write a blog entry about your experience. What tools did you use? Was it a difficult task? What parts of the task were difficult and what were easy Was it a realistic task? What was realistic about it, what wasn't? (value 1 point)

Today we were provided the grocery database's access file. The original schema was not normalised and quite inefficient in design. I used Microsoft Access to create new relationships and tables to bring the overall database to third normal form. Unfortunately because it had been approximately a year or more since I'd played around with normalisation I found it quite difficult to start!

All in all I found it relatively difficult, mainly because I had to remind myself about how to achieve each step within normalising a database. It was a generally realistic task, I could see how a company running in the real world might be completely oblivious to the fact that their database is not running as efficiently as possible..