A month or so ago, my boss and I had a meeting about my current job role and how it would be changing. Currently, I am managing a CRM system that is used throughout the organization. I also work with our core transaction system making changes and adjustments as needed, and I write reports from this database.

When we met, she said that she wanted me to work on special projects that came up within the IT department for the time being. Beginning in 2009 I will start to transition to the role of a developer. This kind of took me by surprise, but it is also something I had been thinking about in the back of my mind. I just didn’t realize anyone else was thinking it. It is a great opportunity for me, but will also be a challenge.

A lot of the development within the company is done in SQR which unfortunately isn’t that common except with PeopleSoft organizations. A lot of our web applications are written in ASP.NET or VB.NET so those will be very beneficial to learn. I know we have a couple in C# as well. So, it looks like I have a lot to learn and will probably spend the better part of next year learning programming languages. I have dabbled in it once before, but it wasn’t for me at the time. I think this time it will be more enjoyable. I guess we will find out.

We had our first quiz tonight. It was pretty straight forward and I got all of the answers right. I guess that is a step in the right direction. Hopefully our mid term next week will be similar. He said that it would be, it would just cover more material obviously. He had the quiz cover the first three chapters and the mid term will cover the first six. I thought it was a good idea, because it helped us get the studying for the first three chapters out of the way. Now I can spend the weekend studying the next three.

We have been working on taking requirements from the business owner and converting them to a database model. It is pretty interesting all of the assumptions that we make about the data. One person will think it means one thing and someone else will interpret it differently. It goes to show that you must get all of the information before beginning to work on a model. I think this goes for any IT project though and not just database design.

There is some data that I have at work that needs to be put in a database for other employees to access and manipulate. I think it will give me the perfect opportunity to put my knowledge from class into practice. Luckily it is a very small dataset, so it shouldn’t be too difficult. I just have to get a developer to build the interface for the end user. It should be a good learning experience for me.