the corner office

This is a before-and-after mood experiment. I'm due to leave in about an hour's time for my Database Design and Implementation exam. Right now it promises to be about as much fun as sticking blunt pencils up my nose.

The work isn't exactly rocket science and I know exactly what type of stuff will be in the paper. Firstly there'll be a pisswilly application that needs an ERD, dependency diagram and relations. Then a zillion exotic SQL queries to do weird stuff, then how-to style questions on using M$ Access or Delphi, and then general theory and a couple of arb questions on concurrency control. Like I said, no rocket science there.

The devil is in the details, though. Of course I could be a zillion times more prepared than I am now, but this stuff is rather mind-numbingly boring. I don't do a lot of SQL but I know my way around. I can generally get complex queries going, but there is an element of trial-and-error when it's the 3 nested subqueries, needle-in-a-haystack variety. But... trial-and-error doesn't work when you're writing the queries down on paper. I also don't have a off-the-cuff 'show step-by-step how a lost update can happen when there is no record locking' response, although I know I can muddle one out with brute mental force. So, I'm doing a bit of revision and then off we go.

Bleh.