Many-to-many Some time ago I was doing a course in Applied Information Systems. One of the parts I really enjoyed was database design. SQL, entity relationships, and data normalisation all make a kind of useful sense to me, rather than the voodoo that seems to power languages like VB or Python.

I just bumped into a nice description of the basics of database design, which reminded me of how my lecturer back then made a point of saying "you must always resolve the many-to-many relationship: don't ask me why, just do it." He never did tell us why, but he drummed into us the technique for doing it. And it came in handy later on (apart from the usual database design reasons). I went to a job interview, and during the interview the interviewer drew a many-to-many relationship on a piece of paper and asked "is this a good way to store data?" I said "No", and then drew the extra list entity that you need to resolve the relationship. That diagram got me through to the next round of interviews. Didn't end up actually getting me the job though. And that's probably because I find languages like VB and Python are some kind of voodoo.
  ¶ 9:15 AM