(Desktop)Databases to hold Customer and Order/Invoice Info

Getting Started
1

i need to create a database that my customers will be stored in and an invoice database to store the order information.

Customers will have : Company,Name,Address,Invoice#,Phone,Date,Deadline,Terms,Email.
Invoice will have: Invoice#,DateCreated,Deadline,Department,Garment,GarmentColor,Sizes,Qty,Description,UnitPrice,Total.

Im not to sure where to begin. i need to be able to search the database by Name, Deadline, Invoice #. How would i go forth doing this. Every tutorial I’ve seen shows how to connect to a database in a very generic way and nothing on how to view info or write to it. Can someone give me an example . I’m a visual learner so a video or pictures will help out.

Thank you
Travis McBride
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2

You might want to take a look at the Eddie’s Electronics example included with Xojo. It has a SQLite database with customers, products and invoices.

Examples/Sample Applications/EddiesElectronics

An overview is also in User Guide Book 4: Development.

And there are several database webinars on the Xojo YouTube channel.

3

You absolutely need to learn some SQL if you want to build something along these lines. You won’t get far at all without it.

I’d advise getting Xampp so you can have an SQL server running on your machine and get a client app so you can play around building and querying databases (Sequel Pro for Mac is awesome and free - maybe someone else can suggest a PC alternative).

There’s loads of SQL tutorials on the web but I would definitely recommend the Wise Owl YouTube series - very easy to follow.

Part 1 is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-1XQHAgDsM (although this is Microsoft SQL server it’s the same fundamentals as any other SQL variant). The amount of work that can be done by the database for you by writing good SQL queries will probably surprise you.

4

Travis, Paul and Richard are spot on.

For the past 8-10 years, I heard developers moving to ORM, XML, JSON and NoSQL. I am a believer that everything has its place. Being a DBA for most of my career, it’s nice to see a question about learning SQL. The key is not to over engineer and “know what you want before doing.”

Paul has a really nice presentation here. (thanks Paul).

5

Anything you do with a database will require learning some SQL. We created ActiveRecord (and ORM) that eliminates some of the most common errors (table/field misspelling, and wrong datatypes), but even with that you will need to know the basics of SQL and transactional database processing.

6

I started learning database stuff with a Stanford online course - they don’t have the exact one I took, but this one looks like it’s probably the one I took just broken apart into mini-courses (and it’s still free!):
Self Paced Database Course