Databases, week one

I actually found this week's topic enjoyable, even though I'm far from understanding everything. I believe I can decipher a basic ERD, although drawing one from scratch remains a bit more difficult. The one I designed for the dropbox assignment is very simple, yet I'm still unsure I included every possible relationship. Bridge tables and the "O" relationship will take some additional work to fully understand. For instance, I think all of the tables in my ERD can stand alone (a country, attraction, and photographer can exist independently of each other), yet I hesitated to include any "O's" in my diagram. Not sure why...

Level one normalization is pretty easy; level three I'm still not clear on. In fact, levels two and three look almost the same to me. Both normalization and ERD are manageable with simple databases of 3-4 tables, but one can easily imagine how difficult relationship diagrams and normalization will be for more complicated databases.

Same thing with SQL... basics are easy, but to do any "heavy lifting" is going to require time, patience, and practice. The tutorials (especially the UACBT videos) are great, but I'm a long way from sitting down and creating a mature database from scratch. There's nothing surprising here - the basics are easy for most things in life, while achieving demonstrable proficiency requires greater dedication. Fortunately, I find the idea of creating databases for digital collections intriguing, and might pursue something of this nature for my Capstone project.