Regular readers might be hampering for a technical post soon – and you won’t be disappointed. I’ve got the next SDS article (binary data) as well as another few in a series on the ADO Entity Framework (stay tuned for those ones), but I’m going to take the time to do a quick overview of a personal project I’ve been working on.
I’ve wanted to put together a project (web site) using semi-production standards using SQL Server 2008, .Net 3.5 (SP 1) and the ADO Entity Framework (about a week ago my VPS was upgraded to meet these specs!).
Last month I did a new back end (CMS) for a site I’ve been commercially maintaining and it worked a treat. Some of the previous posts were inspired by that site.
So, my inspiration for this project is my collection of LPs – mostly classic vinyl albums. The project is code named ‘VinylDb’ (until I can think of something better) and basically will be a database of my collection with interesting meta data and pictures. It’ll be the basis for a web site hosted on my VPS.
On the weekend I spent a good few hours cataloguing all 150 albums and personally inspecting, cleaning and grading each one. I recorded relevant data for inclusion into the target data schema for the project.
When I opened up my (hand-me-down) copy of George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass” (a triple LP collection) I noticed something peculiar on the ‘A’ sides:
As I understand it, samples and factory copies are quite sought after. Pity these are only in VG+ condition (as opposed to say, mint or barely played). In any case, not a bad little find.
So the moral of the story is – always take a close inspection. You never know what you’ll find.
Anyhow, I finished ETL on Sunday (I imported public domain data for the LPs) and I have a fully populated, normalized, database now. It’s backed by an Entity Framework model (which I used to do the integration/load).
Check back soon – I’ll have more information on the VinylDb project over the next week or so.
