This is the twelfth 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, April 8
We talked about database design today. We reviewed normal forms of databases and what they all meant, as well as discussed when it might be beneficial or not to store data in a de-normalized form. While this discussion might have been more helpful prior to us creating the database schema for the fourth project, it does help having already designed a simple database to better understand the concepts of data normalization. I’m looking forward to adapting our database to the chosen MySQL schema.
Wednesday, April 10
Today we covered working with NULLS and more complex insert statements. This paired with out discussion on Monday. Again I wish we had covered this before the fourth project, but again I was better able to understand the topic having already messed around with pushing data into a database. I’m looking forward to start using databases to query my own datasets. I usually work in excel (I’ve honed my excel function master skills over the past year), however Excel doesn’t have a easy way to create complex queries like SQL does. Excel is better suited at looking at data as a whole, while databases are better for querying data and returning results based on selected datasets.
Friday, April 13
Unfortunately I was out sick today. I think I have come down with the flu. I’m hoping to sleep this off this weekend, and be back ready to go on Monday. We will see!