Employer looking for a 'data base specialist'
Community Forums/General Help/Employer looking for a 'data base specialist'
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| A possible employer is looking to hire me as a data base specialist, primarily to keep and update a data base full of e-mails. He wants it to work like Constant Contact, where folks go to his site, type in their e-mail and hit the 'subscribe' button, and their e-mail is then stored on his own server instead of Constant Contact, although in all respects it works pretty much the same way. What programs\knowledge might I be expected to have for such a job? I have experience with Microsoft Access, but that's about it as far as Databases go. Thanks! Werdiques. |
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| You'll probably need to be fluent in at least one flavour of sql. and maybe php and html. |
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| Data base or database? :-) |
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| You'll probably need to be fluent in at least one flavour of sql. and maybe php and html. I know enough html so I can pick the rest up pretty fast if need be. sql is a good one, so I'll work on learning that. Same with php :) Data base or database? :-) Err, was unaware there was a difference? Any more ideas? |
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| Err, was unaware there was a difference? There is, in that a database is an organized system for storing your data, and 'data base' means absolutely nothing. |
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| oh. is feeling dim |
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| Since the posting company calls it 'data base' I wonder how well informed they are with their own doings :-). |
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| No,that was me that called it 'data base'. That's how I wrote it down :) |
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| Here is a random list of things to ask yourself: 1. What operating system? To be more specific, is this a windows standard IIS web server? Are they using Microsoft SQL server, or other? Are they using ASP? Also, in regards to the server, is the data being collected from one web server and then transmitted to a physically different server? Your opening description makes it sound as if this is the case. Are you collecting this information over standard, unencrypted plain text? 2. Are you creating the web pages, or are you just hooking into already created web pages? 3. What exactly are the fields (information) for the database that you will be collecting? You will obviously have to create the front end for collecting the data. But what about the back-end, the querying of the database information? How much experience do you have creating database tables, redundancy elimination, key fields, IDs, joins? 4. Security? Is this also going to be part of your job? Do you know how to properly secure a SQL server? Are there going to be any fields in the database that will have to be encrypted? These are just a few things to consider with out going to much into exact details of the web design and SQL server database design. If this is going to be a small project just collecting name and email, then obviously there is a lot less to have to consider. |
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| Also, keep in mind: doing things with databases is easy. Doing things *right* is much more difficult. It's hard to keep everything secure and safe from SQL injection attacks, and keep things efficient (poorly written queries and database design can be thousands of times slower than properly written ones pulling the same data, depending on the data sets you're dealing with, which means you may be wasting a lot of server resources and end up with a very slow system if you don't really know what you're doing) As an example, at a company I used to work for we once inherited a large SQL database where a single large query took ~40 minutes to complete. After shuffling things around a bit and re-wording some of the queries, we were able to return identical results in 10-12 seconds. All I'm saying, be careful where you thread. SQL is really one of those things you need to do a lot of reading for to find out how to *properly* do things, and use it efficiently. Trying to just 'wing it' as you go along is likely going to result in a poorly designed, poorly secured resource hog, which ends up speweing viagra spam in under a week if it's connected to the internet. |
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| Many thanks for the advice guys! @Shortwind 1. I have no clue as to any of that. My possible employer wasn't big on the details, so I'm going to have to play ahead to be able to handle most common setups. 2. Once again no idea. 3. This one I can handle. I have experience in all of that :) 4. Once again no idea. Probably not, but I want to know how to handle this securely if need be. @xlsior I shall definitely be keeping this one in mind. Cheers, W E R D N A |
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