Distant Village Packaging is an exciting and rapidly growing international company specializing in custom hand-made packaging for fine chocolates, tea/coffee, bath/body/spa, and other specialty markets. Our designers create exclusive and innovative packaging solutions to reinforce our clients brand and image. All packaging is produced by highly-skilled artisan groups in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Distant Village Packaging is committed to eco-friendly and sustainable development and is a passionate contributor toward the communities and people we work with.

We are actively seeking the right candidate to join our growing international team as an intern Web Database Programmer in our Chicago office. This is an excellent opportunity to develop creative Web-based Database applications.

This position is well suited for a person with highly creative and proven web programming and database skills with knowledge of security and database record locking. You must be a self starter who enjoys the challenges of taking ownership and responsibility to get the complete work with rapid turn-around. We offer a friendly and supportive working environment in which you will be challenged, valued, and encouraged to grow in our company.

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Relational databases are really great for storing and retrieving data, but sometimes, they aren’t quite up to the task. Joe Celko, whose SQL for Smarties books are among my favorites, dedicated an entire volume to the issue of trees and hierarchies. These data structures might be common and useful in most programming languages, but they can be difficult to model as tables, particularly if you care about efficient use of the database. Things become even trickier if you’re dealing with a number of related, but distinct, types of entities, such as different types of employees or different types of vehicles.

One way to solve this problem is not to use relational databases. Objects can be quite good at handling trees and arrays, as well as inheritance hierarchies. Furthermore, object databases do exist, and the Python-based Zope application framework has demonstrated that it’s even possible to have object databases in production. Gemstone’s demonstration of Ruby running on top of its Smalltalk VM, with its accompanying object database, means that Ruby programmers soon might have access to similar technology.

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