On Fri, Sep 28, 2001 at 03:54:05PM +0100, Nigel Pauli wrote:

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On Friday 28 September 2001 14:42, Frank Shute wrote:

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I'd be happy to give you a hand with the database design which is important but often neglected. Things like normalisation of your tables & doing a proper entity-relationship diagram is important so that you don't end up having to redo your tables bacause of integrity problems. Also allows you to extend the database easily in future if the need arises. DB design is a bit of a black art which requires some experience and a good deal of formal study if it's to be done properly & time not wasted.

I'd be interested in learning this as well! Would you be interested in doing a workshop on this at anytime?

That's a possibility but not for a while as I'm fairly busy ATM; doing a bit of DB design and table normalisation is one thing but organising some sort of coherent workshop for school users is another!

BTW, what would everybody be interested in implementing with regards a web-based DB? Are there any OSS projects out there for schools that meet their needs? If not why not? What about commercially available software? etc.

During the long winter nights I wouldn't mind putting something together, GPL of course, then perhaps organise a workshop.

Replacement for SIMS :-) Bit of a big project though! Mind if we had a few people each doing a bit it might be possible. If there was an Open Source replacement for SIMS most schools wouldn't need Windows for admin. computers. Might be possible to get some grants to support such a project. regards, Ian -------------------------------------------------------