This is the seventh post in a weekly series of blog posts I will be writing to document my experience in CS327E, Elements of Databases, for the Elements of Computing Program at The University of Texas at Austin.
Check out my previous week’s blog post.
Monday, February 25
We introduced our third project, which will mark out start into SQL work in projects. This first project is essentially designing a XML schema XSD and generating ten entries that validate with the schema. We will later be merging the data from all the groups in the class using a chosen group’s schema. My group is six people (with a seventh person who is evaluating the class) and I have been chosen as the group leader due to my experience with XML, Git and Github. While I think this first part of the project is very simply, I am a bit scared of having to deal with six UT Student’s schedules. It’s one thing when you are working with a large team that works at the same company that at least has somewhat of a similar schedule. When working with students at a large university, all from different majors, group meetings quickly become difficult to arrange.
Wednesday, February 27
We dove back into SQL today, mainly talking about relations and reviewing what we had covered thus far. I have a pretty good intuition writing SQL queries. I got my exam back and got near perfect on the hand coding section, while I missed a few on the multichoice. I never was much of a multichoice test taker. I did the International Baccalaureate (IB) program in high school and we almost never had multichoice exams, they were almost always free response / essay questions. I thing those types of questions allow you more of a chance to demonstrate your knowledge rather than testing some specific something with a multichoice questions. I did well on the exam as a whole, so I can’t complain. I’m enjoying the class and find the material very interesting, and very useable in the real world!
Friday, March 1
We had our first meeting Thursday evening. We met at the PCL (aka PCHELL). I really do despise that building. I don’t find it very captivating to work in. I’m someone who is very affected by my work surroundings and the Perry Caseñeda Library just doesn’t do it for me. We met for two hours. I taught/reviewed git branching with everyone, as I am adamant that everyone know how to use it. We then started discussing the XML schema we wanted to use. Overall a good meeting, though its hard to get six people to agree on one thing. Let’s wait and see how messy this gets when we have to import the other class group’s data (using different schema) into our XML. Collisions. Collisions. Collisions. Professor Downing has suggested we as a class agree on a schema, but you try to get ~45 students to agree on one thing, impossible. So we will see what happens. I shared Schema.org with everyone in the class in hopes that they might take some design clues from it. We will see!