Making A Start

I am a very firm believer in building a website from the ground up. It's all well and good having a really good front end but if the back end code doesn't work, a pretty site is as good as useless. That's not to say that some of the design work shouldn't be done before hand. You couldn't, after all, build something without having some idea of what you are wanting it to do. But I have seen websites before that I can tell the developers have spent a lot of time designing a pretty user interface but not a lot of time on the background code. These sites look really pretty, but as soon as more than ten people are using it, the site slows considerably, or the Javascript doesn't work, or updating data will take too long.

For this reason, I have decided that I am first going to concentrate on the database. I need somewhere to store the data and content that I am hoping the users of the site will provide. I have some ideas in mind of what is going to be in the database, how much data there will be, and what the common searches will be, so it shouldn't be too difficult to get the first few tables with their relevant indexes, constraints etc in place. I am concentrating on the basic functionality to begin with, but will try to leave the tables open to the more complex functionality that will come later.

Time to start writing some table definitions. I know that there are many other ways of creating a data store these days, but for some reason when it comes to creating a database, I like to do things by hand. I have a very specific way of writing database creation scripts that I have been using for many years now. Certain parts of the way in which I write the scripts have changed over the years, but the basis of it remains the same. I feel a lot happier writing the scripts by hand as I find it easier than relying on the overly fiddly user interfaces that some database builders will use.

Time to break out SQL Server Management Studio and get to work