My last lesson with The Apprentice was basically pointing him to a very good DB Fundamentals MVA. I told him a few sections to skip and what to focus on and asked him to make a list of the things that needed clarification. DB Design was off the list, since we are still navigating SSMS, working through Recovery Models, etc.
When I checked in with him Sunday, he had independently gone through the previously mentioned MORECAKE database of his music collection, added every song from his favorite band (manually), added an album table to the design, and created a view on a view.
When we created this DB, it just had artist and song tables. He has already picked up the idea of logical groupings of related records, and joining the tables by ID columns. One small fix to the Song table, and showing him a view can have more than 2 tables and his logic worked perfectly. He even spent quite a bit of time on his own Googling for the best way to get his view to work before bringing me into it.
Gotta say, I’m thoroughly impressed with the initiative! I left him with: “Figure out why the SQL Agent isn’t working in SSMS” so we can start learning to automate the backups.
He’s got the potential to go quite far with this…
