My first database

I grew up on a farm. Lest anyone automatically load up their preconceived notions of farmers, my Dad was (and is) very interested in computers and purchased the original IBM PC back in the early/mid 80's. He found a lot of practical use in the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program, and could fly through the keyboard shortcuts (I guess they weren't really shortcuts in those days, as there wasn't a mouse) fast enough to put him on the same level with any Unix geek today with Emacs or Vi.

In the 90's, I remember him buying our 486/66 with 16MB of RAM from Micron and describing it as a computer that would "peel out on the lawn." My dad is a tractor-guy and has always been obsessed with horsepower. He still likes to rev up his Steiger tractors and listen to the power. This type of personality translates well into the computer field.

Anyway, I had been interested in computers since he brought the first one home. Sometime around when he got the Micron, he paid a lot of money for this thing called a database. I'm not even sure which one it was, I think it might have been FoxPro 2. He wanted to use it to track information on our crop fields: what seed brand had been planted, when it had been worked, fertilizers used, statistics on the yield, stuff like that. He didn't really know how this new software worked, but he understood that it could do stuff like that better than a spreadsheet could. He was totally right.

Unfortunately for him, he was relying on me to make this work (think lazy teenager, I'm not saying all teenagers are lazy, but I was). He knew I grasped computer concepts much more quickly than he did, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it: at least for the 20 minutes I tried. The FoxPro box sat on the shelf, unused, and it probably is still sitting there.

I titled this post "My First Database", and I guess that story doesn't fit the requirement since I didn't really actually create a database. So here's this story:

A few years later, after my first two years of college, I went on a Co-op at Pratt & Whitney as a programmer. That was where I first learned Perl, among other things, and I can remember building a few web applications that were meant to help access these legally retained documents (think plane crash, faulty engine, lawsuit). Incredulously, I basically had to design and build these applications myself (just finished 2nd year of Computer Science). Perl CGI was pretty cutting edge in 1996, but at the time (and not even until after I graduated) I still didn't really have the foggiest notion of a database. Having no other guidance from the more experienced engineers or my manager, I based what was essentially the database on the unix filesystem and a set of storage conventions I coded into my application.

This was, in essence, my first database, but I had enough sense at this point to realize that:

1. this didn't feel right
   
2. there had to be a better way to manage the data
   
3. this thing was going to break as soon as my co-op ended and no one would be able to fix it.
   

I never heard what happened.

That's right, my first database was flat files. One of my co-workers at Yahoo, Dave, likes to listen to me and Tim, the Oracle Architect, talk about databases and he (Dave) likes to joke that flat files are his database expertise. He would be so proud.

What does this have to do with anything? I think about how both of these experiences would have been different if it had been set today. How awesome is it that a) MySQL is freely available on the net (indeed, along with plenty of other good choices) and b) the tools to learn and understand these systems are freely available to anyone. There are so many more opportunities for guys who are interested enough, like my dad, to take these tools and build something without wasting a lot of money.

I'm not sure my Dad would get MySQL, he's more into trading stocks nowadays than learning new technologies (though he did just buy his first Mac), or if he would have "gotten" it then. He did have me, and realized I was capable of understanding it, I was just too busy playing X-wing.

I realize now that this post is a gushy open-source loving rant (of which I never bother to read myself anymore once I identify it) but I guess that's at least somewhat reflective of how I feel on the subject after careful analysis. I'm no hardcore zealot, but it is cool to look back just a short 10-15 years and see how much has changed.