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Keeping track of volunteer hours can be a complex task, particularly for larger organizations. However, SQL offers a powerful and flexible way to create a tracking system. This blog post takes you through the process of developing a volunteer hours tracking system in SQL, complete with some code examples.
Creating the Volunteer Table
The first step in creating a Volunteer Hours Tracking system is to set up a Volunteer table. This table can hold information such as volunteer’s name and contact information, among other things. Here’s a simple way to create such a table:
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CREATE TABLE Volunteer ( id INT PRIMARY KEY, name VARCHAR(100), contact VARCHAR(100) ); |
Creating the Hours Table
The Hours table is where we’ll log each individual volunteering session. It could include details of the date, duration, and the volunteer who did the work. For simplicity, let’s say that all sessions are quantified in hours. Here is how we could create the Hours table:
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CREATE TABLE Hours( id INT PRIMARY KEY, volunteer_id INT, date DATE, hours FLOAT, FOREIGN KEY (volunteer_id) REFERENCES Volunteer(id) ); |
Totaling Hours per Volunteer
One of the most common tasks will be to find out the total hours worked by each volunteer. This can be achieved rather directly with a JOIN and GROUP BY:
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SELECT Volunteer.name, SUM(Hours.hours) FROM Volunteer JOIN Hours ON Volunteer.id = Hours.volunteer_id GROUP BY Volunteer.name; |
Tracking Volunteer Performance Over Time
Another task presented for these types of systems is to track the progress of each volunteer over a period of time. SQL makes this easy with the help of GROUP BY and ORDER BY:
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SELECT Volunteer.name, Hours.date, SUM(Hours.hours) FROM Volunteer JOIN Hours ON Volunteer.id = Hours.volunteer_id GROUP BY Volunteer.name, Hours.date ORDER BY Hours.date; |
Wrapping up
This tutorial is a basic model of a Volunteer Hours Tracking System. In reality, it would be wise to include additional features such as duplicate entry checking, data validation, and more. However, this provides an excellent starting point for a System using SQL. Happy coding!