Tracking Software
If you were going to be super-finicky then you'd say that this is not strictly speaking an Oracle-related matter, but Wired Magazine has an article on the tracking of tea-brewing in an office environment. Since I've worked with teams of DBA's whose very life-force only endured through application of a carefully judged ratio of tea and beer, it is in some sense at least semi-related to Oracle.
It would be refreshing for students to have to design a database schema to support this tea-tracking functionality, instead of the usual student-database crap. Or DVD Rental crap.
It's funny how the really great ideas only seem obvious when someone else has thought of them, but there you go, that's life I suppose. I regret that as a home-worker I always have to make the tea myself.
posted by David Aldridge @ 2:00 PM
2 Comments:
I agree that these excercises miss the REALLY IMPORTANT ISSUES in life - like tea and beer. But . . .
. . . I'd like to say a word for the DVD/Video problem you link to. It's relatively simple, self-contained and yet includes most/all the issues you'd ever come across in real life. How many db pro's do you think could give a good answer to this problem?
I've used the DVD rental example myself to illustrate points to non-technical staff ... like "Your customers rent out a particular movie 10 times in a week, and you have three widescreen copies of it and two fullscreen copies in stock -- how many widescreen copies did they rent out?"
The point being, of course, that you don't know.
That was for an American audience of course. I'm not sure that they'd appreciate the much higher relevance of a tea-based example :)
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