This month’s T-SQL Tuesday blog is brought to us by Todd Kleinhans (b | t) and this month topic is about what you use databases in your personal life. As database professionals, it shouldn’t really surprise anybody that we do this, after all, we love data. I can think of a million ways everyone could be using databases in their personal lives.
I personally have two main databases. One I haven’t touched in a while is my sports card collection. I have over 50,000 baseball, basketball, and football cards that I put in database years ago and haven’t updated since I haven’t really bought any new cards. I used to spend hours updating the database monthly on the pricing and be able to run queries to tell me how much my collection was worth. My first database for this was created when I was in 7th grade on a program called My Databases (not sure it was a real database) but at least my collection was organized on my MS-DOS 3.3 machine and I had a nice floppy disk menu system built to tell which disc to insert to get to the which set of data. Yes, I was programming at that age too.
Today I store my fitness data in a database. Yes, everything my Garmin watch is recorded including all the exercise I get, like I know I’ve already exercised more time-wise this year than I did all last year combined (such a sad state of affairs to speak on last year). I started this when I started running to keep up with my training runs then expanded into to include my triathlon training. Then bought a fancy Garmin watch that tracks so much other stuff and wanted to know who much sleep I was getting on average. Last year I average an hour less sleep than I did the year before (another sad statistic ).
Those are the two databases I use personally. I don’t have a reason to have one for anything else that hasn’t already been made.
