Database schemas are not the new creative writing
I’ve been working on a database schema all day. I’m creating tables to hold data that is extracted from flat files. So far, no normal. But there are two problems:
1. There is a lot of data that is not consistent and with rather obscure dependencies
2. There are few natural unique keys
Three problems, actually, if I include the fact that I really want to be working on some fiction.
But I’m being paid to design a database, so design a database I need to do.
I tried to kid myself that the challenges of defining and naming tables and their relationships was like plotting a book and seeing how the characters connected.
That ploy worked for about ten minutes.
I got stuck for a while and went for a walk in the cold bright air — and to pick up my father’s prescription — in an effort to clear my head and solve a few challenges at the same time. Like I would if I had a knotty fiction problem.
It didn’t work.
Probably because I started thinking of knotty fiction problems instead of the problematic database issues instead.
My take-away from this is that it will take greater minds than mine to link database design and novel writing.
It may even take greater minds than mine to get this fucking database schema up and working.
And I couldn’t even fit in a joke about foreign keys.
