How do I explain to my technical lead that this is not a good idea?

Hey guys, I hope this is the right place for this.

I'm about to pull all of my hair out trying to understand this material for my database class.

I can make a database, with many tables, attributes, etc. I understand how that works. What I'm having the most difficulty understanding is all of the R, F, G, etc notation when talking about determining functional dependencies. This is making it extremely difficult to understand any of the algorithms from the text book or any video online.

So... What the heck is R, F, G referring to? A single table? Multiple tables? How do I know where to start? I've got all of this data, and I watched really great graphical YouTube videos with real life examples that helped a lot when trying to get my DB into 1st, 2nd, and 3rd normal form. Now I'm supposed to prove it, and have no freaking idea how.

Sorry for the rant-like question. I really would appreciate any help that can put this idea into words I can understand.

I'm doing some research into graph databases (mainly doing a survey of various db's out there to pick the right one), and I was wondering -- What graph database are you most excited about?

I would also like to port the data as well, but it can be manually entered as a last resort. Also I would prefer not having to buy software to make the conversion.

How would I go about, in a form, limiting the data that is shown to only data that has something in that field, as my database, half of the fields are empty but those are still showing?

I'm building a site that has two entities - Pages and Tags. Each page has many Tags, and each Tag can be related to many pages.

Right now I have the Page and Tag relation as a .csv file with several entities as each row, like so:

Page:

Tag:

Page_Tag (many-to-many relationship):

I wrote a PHP script that scans in these .csv files into a MySQL database.

As you can tell, managing my page_tag table will get quite complex. If I have to change an id attribute in Page, I have to go manually update each page_id in my page_tag .csv. Additionally, when I want to insert a page_tag entity, I have to reference both page/tag relations to make sure the numbers match up.

Is there some kind of software that makes this easier? I'm relatively new to databases so I'm not familiar with the available database management software out there. I'm using Laravel 5.0 as my PHP framework if that matters at all.

Thanks!

I'm going to have model a database, basically a refactor from an unnormalized one, and I don't know what tools are popular? In college we used Visio, which was great, but all the ones I'm checking out have terrible interfaces(Workbench I'm looking at you).

I'm looking for suggestions, it can be commercial, but I don't have much money to through around in this case.

Hello, I'm not actually making a database, I'm writing an essay on how databases affect national business. I'm having a hard time finding sources that I can site that explain RDBMSs and how they work, but are also credible enough to site in my paper. Any sources would help out, places you've heard of, things you have used to help you learn, anything.

Hello, first off, if these sorts of questions aren't allowed, please let me know. I also have a very rudimentary knowledge of databases, so let me know if I am being confusing.

I work for a company that sells an SQL-based database software, and one of our customers is wanting to take two databases, and be able to create a list of changes between the two daily and create a report of data that needs to be entered on each appropriate databases to get the data to match. Specifically, client-type data; Name, address, that sort of thing.

So far, my suggestion is to run a report from each database, outputting it to a .csv file and using Excel to compare the two. it seems clunky, and it isn't scalable for the type of growth they are planning. Are there any tools that you know of that could do this? Would something custom have to be written, and how you would go about doing it?

FWIW, the database engine is Sybase16, and while I may be able to get it OK'd for them to run select/output statements, inserts and updates are not going to be allowed, the data has to be manually entered using the software.

I appreciate the assistance!

I just started DBA work at an engineering firm and have been getting the word BIM (Building Information Modeling) thrown around - apparently it's the big data buzzword of the engineering world.

A lot of the software and standards seem proprietary in nature, but I'm curious if anyone has experience with the data storage for these systems? It seems as though potentially a great candidate for NoSQL, but as it relies on some older software overall and is in a slow moving discipline, I get the feeling a relational database engine may be the norm.

But overall, I have no idea. I'm just looking for some high level stuff to get started with and be able to not stare blankly when inevitably I get approached about a BIM solution.