Hey Liliana! Great to meet you, and I'm sure we'll see each other again! I too, work a full-time job, and I do part-time website development and online conference registration in addition to my government job. During this course, at the end of October, I left my old job, started a new job, moved across the country and had a conference to do :D  It was awful and I'm sure my course work suffered. When I moved to my new place, in the Arctic, I couldn't even get internet hooked up at my house until the ice road was in, so I missed a lot of time.

I know how you feel! We do it because we love it, I guess. Learning will never end, and I love Athabasca, and the freedom it gives.

Hey Sarah! Thanks for all the kind words! You don't know how much they mean to me! Yes learning is a journey, not a destination. I often remind myself that if there is no pain, there will be no gain. I've sent a request to connect on Linkedin along your way! I hope to stay in touch with like-minded people like you! Good luck with the rest of your Masters journey at Athabasca!

I feel your pain on how busy you ave been! Between work, my kids activities and trying to balance the remainder of this course with the other course that I am doing (which includes an exam this week) it's been a little overwhelming. But we are finally in the home stretch!

That's really interesting that SQL is not the top laguage for data mining, I never would have thought. I am taking the individual data mining course starting January 1, now that you have posted this I think I will start looking to R and Python to maybe use that course as an opportunity to learn a couple of new languages, so thank you for posting this!

Hi Shallen, 

Thanks for your reply. It is always a great feeling to hear that I could help sombody one way or another. Yes, I was very surprised too as I have been using SQL as main programming lanaguages for all data mining prospects at work, but it's time for me to learn something new. R has challenged me much so far! I will take Data Mining class in Winmter 2019 too, so see you again soon :)

This is looking good, Liliana. I wonder, though, whether there is another entity lurking in the relationship between an employee and a cash register? Seems to me that a cash register will be used by many employees, and an employee may use many cash registers, which implies to me that there must be an associative entity between them. I've never worked as a sales clerk in a supermarket so am not sure of the terminology but I've noticed the ones doing so talking about 'shifts' on the till: might be a possible entity? Don't forget to draw relationships explicitly, wherever there's a foreign key: there's one between receipt and customer_more_reward, for instance (the foreign key implies that the many end is at the receipt, I think). My own experience of the More Rewards program suggests that the phone number is very important to the system and *might* be a significant index. It also suggests that redemption matters (not in the religious sense!) - quite a lot of products are offered at a reduced price or even free with More Rewards, and that makes a difference on the receipt (and to the customer's reward points - might there be a need to record these?). Beware, too, of complexities around those offers. Some of them are affected by the number of items purchased. This may imply further entities - perhaps including a 'discount' entity that affects a receipt? It would not be a bad idea to look at a real receipt to make sure that you've picked up on all the possible attributes, including those that are implied. Another useful intuition pump might be to think about whether and how the model changes for online customers getting their groceries delivered.