I didn’t get much exposure to databases until I reached university. In my early days of learning Java and Visual Basic, I never worked on complex enough projects to justify a DB, so I never learned how to use them. It wasn’t until I took INFO 1103 Data and Information Management that I discovered how powerful DBs are. This course used Microsoft SQL Server not MySQL but based on my professor’s recommendation and ease of access, I pursued MySQL on my own time and when school projects required a DB.

In my first co-op at IBM, I got to know MySQL, and relational databases in general, pretty well. Part of my work as a Quality Assurance Co-op involved maintaining MySQL servers which stored test results and run configurations. This work included occasionally modelling and implementing new schema’s as we identified new requirements. I was also responsible for implementing new features in Java and PHP to interact with modifications to the database. I also queried the databases via command line and the SQL client SQuirreL daily.

My next significant exposure to MySQL came once I started working at The Learning Bar (TLB). My work at TLB began with a project to provide dashboards and reports to client facing staff based on data stored primarily in a MySQL database. The database I was working with was quite the behemoth. The database performed very well processing writes but was a nightmare to query efficiently. My time producing reports gave me plenty of experience optimizing queries.

In addition to reading from a database, I also got to participate in designing a new database at TLB. To overcome the previously mentioned issues with the read performance, we started to develop a new reporting database that would be more simple and efficient to query. I got to do extensive research on star schema databases and exploring the performance differences at different normal forms. While researching, I simultaneously designed and tested different schemas. In addition to creating the schemas, I also had to write ETL scripts in Python to get the data from the transactional database to the reporting database. My work on this project lad me to continue my studies in database administration through INFO3403 Information System Administration.

I continued to use MySQL through my time at TLB. I mostly queried data, taught new employees the nuances of the transnational schema, and continued to be consulted on the reporting database. I look back at helping design that reporting database as my most significant endeavour with MySQL. I don’t think I’ll ever be solely a database administrator, but in today’s data-driven world, it’s practically impossible to succeed in the tech industry without a firm grasp of relational databases. MySQL has been my vessel to getting comfortable with relational databases, and for that MySQL, I thank you.