My first week of work without my trainer there is over. It went much better than I thought it would go, honestly. Despite being unsure initially how to do several things, I worked through it all and got all my work done. There were some hiccups, and there is one project that is yet to be done, but I'm not sure if I currently have access to the requisite databases for it.
This week has been a crash course in SQL. It's a wonderfully simple language. I found myself confused and frustrated with it at several points, but I overcame them all. At one point, I couldn't get the data sorted in quite the way I wanted, but I was able to find a work-around. I created a new data field, made it use that field to sort, and then dropped the field and it worked. It's amazing what you can accomplish algorithmically by using data creation/manipulation.
I spent approximately nine to ten of my hours this week typing in the last day of each month of the year time upon time again in order to extract particular data for a request. I had never really memorized them before. It wouldn't suffice to say that now I do. They have now become ingrained in my head, not just the numbers, but the shape, the feeling of it all. I can't unknow them.
Moving efforts can begin on Thursday. We should really start packing in earnest.
