Diving into Databases

Alot has happened in the last couple of days. I've

• Figured out a bit more about using Putty to navigate a PostGres database
• Gotten a login to the server for phpPgAdmin so I don't always have to use Putty
• Learned a little bit about how Php scripting works
• Been introduced to Eclipse, but currently still don't know any Java to program in it

All in all, things are going well. I don't have a data mining objective yet, so I've been analyzing and exploring the database(s) to familiarize myself with the different fields. I really wish it had come with some documentation; I can tell what most of the fields represent, but others have titles that are entirely meaningless to me. There's also several tables that I can tell are significant, but have no way of knowing exactly what they represent. (Like, the difference between direct_lastorder and direct_lastorder_hold)

I'm currently compiling a list organized by table of individual fields that look promising. I'm particularly focusing on fields that could correlate customer characteristics and purchasing habits. I'm also thinking that it might be interesting to mine data on individual products and find correlations between customers and the products they tend to buy, and through what channels.

All of my current objectives will require learning alot more about database access. I'll also have to figure out how to create new fields that are built by comparing several others. I still have a huge learning curve ahead of me, but I can at least see the sequence of steps I'm going to have to go through to get there.