For the Database Development assignment, I created a database of employees and their relationships to assessments, evaluations and compensation. This assignment taught me the basic philosophies behind database creation, including entities and relationships, primary and foreign keys, and tidy data. Although this assignment was a handful of simple spreadsheets, it felt like an overwhelming amount of information to connect together. I frequently work with HR databases and Learning Management Systems to keep track of my student employees’ data, which operate on amounts of data orders of magnitude larger than I was working with in this small database. This assignment helped me appreciate not only the philosophies and reasoning behind many design choices, but also the work and thought that goes into any given database. I gained a new perspective on the Media Resource Center’s legacy database, which was a home-grown system created on Filemaker, and the work that went into a system that housed and circulated over 10,000 items, kept track of users, and even had the capability of users being authors on their own albums.