Hi guys, I'm changing my carrer and would like focus on database design. I started working with a online company and designed a purchase order database in Access (split) which seems to work ok but have had a glitch or two from it.

I am wondering what people use for a front end for the average employee to enter data into. So far I only know of Access and asp.net (need to learn asp.net).

I want to put SQL 2008 onto our server and would like to explore another front end.

I am starting UNI at the end of this month and I see Java is something we will be learning. Am I better of learning c++ on the side? I have started a bit of VB which seems easy enough to learn.

Thanks to any one who can help, hope to be on these boards for a long time.

Which programming language(s) you choose & which database system you choose to learn first aren't actually that important. Make sure you gain a good grasp of whatever you're studying at Uni (especially the concepts of abstraction, modularity, code reuse), and your skills should be pretty transferable between languages.

As for the specific application you mentioned (purchase order database), using something like ASP.Net for a web interface and SQL Server 2008 as your storage medium is a good route to go if you like working with Microsoft technologies. You could also use something like PHP for the frontend and MySQL for storage if you want to go the open source route (my personal preference). You'll want to learn some Javascript (perhaps AJAX) as well.

Good luck, hope you enjoy the new career!