I’ve always liked computers. Going back to the early 80s, when Dad would bring home some sort of workstation about the size of a medium-sized suitcase with an 8″ floppy drive. It was on this machine that I first learned about typing in commands to get a computer to do things. It was where I customized my very first computer program. Dad had some code (I think I named it “Sparkle”) that would generate a random starfield comprised of asterisks. The code populated the screen with asterisks that would twinkle on and off endlessly until the sequence was interrupted. It was my first exposure in any stripe to the world of programming. (Reason 32,576,881 Why I Love Wikipedia: I was just researching the TRS-80 for the next paragraph of this entry and saw a picture of the aforementioned workstation – A TRS-80 Model II.)

Not long after, I was in the LEAP program in grade school, programming away on one of the school’s TRS-80s. It was marvelous. That eventually led to my dad buying one for our home. It used a little color TV as the monitor and a sort of portable audiocassette player as the storage medium. These foundations in the TRS-80 model of BASIC was a perfect foundation for the Apple II version of BASIC that I would use to great effect in my last two years at Caernarvon Elementary, eventually producing an animation of a helicopter with blades that appeared to rotate!

I’ve been using computers almost without interruption for over a quarter of a century. I’ve always been something of a tinkerer with my machines. In my Mac days, I started delving into the world of ResEdit and tweaking applications to behave the way I wanted them to. But, weirdly enough, it was a much-reviled Microsoft program that caught my fancy: Access. I took a class my senior year devoted to Access (it was called AIS, but I don’t remember what that stood for), and was about the only class from that year that stuck with me (I’d largely completed my core & degree requirements by the time of my final semester, so I was taking stuff like AIS and Principles of Sociology). It was there I first learned the fundamentals of relational databases.

Flash-forward to 2005. I achieve a new underemployed status and start considering the best new direction for my career. After spending considerable stretches of time cataloging and categorizing various stuff in my life, I realize that teaching myself some skill that uses these skills I’m gaining in the process might be a constructive use of my time. After doing some research into the various options, I settled on learning ColdFusion. There was a developer version of the product that was free to use on a local computer. I bought the WACK, and started off.

I almost immediately derailed. CFML, while being a database structure, was an entirely new environment. The only thing tying it together with my understanding of databases in general was this thing called SQL. Because you don’t really need to use SQL (pronounced “sequel”) when you’re creating tables and relationships and defining attributes in Access, I’d never really bothered with the code end, the SQL innards, of what I was doing. So the ColdFusion learning process slowed. Then I got out of my underemployment, and the ColdFusion learning process ground to a halt.

With the migration to Tessitura this summer, and then the fuller knowledge of what we’ve introduced ourselves to at the Nashville conference, it’s become abundantly clear that I’m going to have to start putting some specifics, some cold and hard code, to my conceptual understanding of databases. The tool I’ll be using for that code: SQL Server. The big leagues.

Begin tran.