any database designers out there?? you're my only hope

The only thing I'll say up front is, charge an hourly or daily rate. Do *NOT* name a flat-fee or the job will spiral out of control. Seriously.

whatever you do, keep it simple without any hardcoded noncesense so the client can fiddle with it, otherwise in three years time when the people who commissioned it are long gone and no one has your contact details some poor schmuck will have to sit and tear their hair out trying to work out how the eff it works before starting from scratch again...

...guess what i've had to do recently?

No, don't worry Kate, I am a relativly low earner, which means I have a smaller penis than you. I get a pay rise soon though - does that mean I get a bigger dick as well? Yay!

(And BTW, half of the code notetaking is so that you yourself can actually remember what the heck this scrawl of code is supposed to do!)

email me at j d s a l m o n @ g m a i l. , willya?

Sign up to the accessd list. They have people who have written books on upsizing and are v. helpful.

I'm using Visual Basic 2005 Express to create an application which will just list an editable database of stuff, but I don't want to have to enter all the info manually. Luckily, I have it all on an Excel spreadsheet: 10 columns and 9000 rows, I just want to import it. But how? I've searched hard without much success... ILX: you're my only etc.

Access will create the table structure for you.

...and I don't have Access. Would that help? How would I use what Access creates in VBExpress?

You could read a CSV file itself; they're fairly simple, but I wouldn't advise it, as there are a few caveats that are enough to annoy you.

Most databases will have something, somewhere that would read in from CSV, but you haven't said what you're trying to read it into yet!

http://sqlserver2000.databases.aspfaq.com/how-do-i-load-text-or-csv-file-data-into-sql-server.html

But I think you might want to read up a bit about SQL server before you start, though. Just to understand how it relates to the VB program you're going to create.

I can actually see the database in Visual Studio, but I just can't link it up as a datasource in Visual Basic Express. Right-clicking on Data Connections and choosing a new source only allows me to select an actual file, but of course the db exists on the server, not as a concrete file. Grrrr.

Disclaimer: I am dumb when it comes to this stuff, very much an amateur, and know only a little more than jack when it comes to making web pages.

I'm interested in starting a user-contribution site, that they can submit information to a book database, which is published as a public web page directory. Immediately I thought I would just go for a Wikia site, but the organization is not really powerful enough for it - I want to be able to sort results by different/multiple fields (i.e. author, date, title, etc.) and Wiki software is generally terrible at that sort of thing. As a dumbass who doesn't really dabble much in this stuff, is there a good, straight-forward existing framework for this kind of thing, or am I better off just painfully writing my own MySQL DB/PHP code? (i have no idea how to do this right now, especially w/rt a user system that can publically edit the DB).

If I can't find something I'll probably just go with Wikia and do clumsy, manually-written static and index pages, but I feel like there's got to be a better way in terms of programming and efficiency, especially since I forsee hundreds or thousands of records being updated regularly, and would really like it to be a community/multi-user driven site.

If you're going to write up something custom, and you don't know much programming, you probably want the ruby on rails framework (google "ruby on rails")

have you ever programmed before? there are better frameworks, but that's not too bad to start. i'm sure that there's a "click and install" framwork to do something approximating what you want, but i don't know.

personally i'd go with django over mysql, but then i write too many of these things and i like python much better- i wouldn't start learning with that, though.

I only know a little bit of programming (bit of C, the basics of PHP and MySQL), and frankly am quite awful at coding, that's why I want to avoid it as much as possible.

For the kind of book database site I'm looking to create, it just seems to make much more sense to do it that way than a wiki, even though that's an easier option. "Click and install" is definitely the kind of thing I'm looking for. I'll look for a free host, maybe I can just dive in and try to make something.