Computer Science BS Journal (CST363) : Week 1

 Class: CST363-30_2253 ( Intro to Database Systems)

From the orientation, your reading from week 1 and your own experience answer the following questions.

  1. Relational database tables and spreadsheets look similar with both having rows and columns.  What are some important differences between the two?
    1. A few important differences I can point out between relational database tables and spreadsheets are Data Integrity/Constraints, Data Relationships, and Data Volume/Performance. 
      1. Data Integrity/Constraints: Relational Database - Provides tools for ensuring data integrity through constraints like primary keys, foreign keys, and unique constraints. This ensures data is valid, consistent, and adheres to business rules. Spreadsheets - Lack inherent features for enforcing data integrity. It’s easy to accidentally input inconsistent or erroneous data. 
      2. Data Relationships: Relational Database - Supports complex relationships between tables, including one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one relationships. You can perform joins to combine data across tables. Spreadsheets - Have no formal concept of relationships between tables. While you can create references or links between sheets, it's not as structured or flexible.
      3. Data Volume/Performance: Relational Database - Can handle large volumes of data efficiently, leveraging indexing, querying optimization, and normalization techniques. They’re built to scale. Spreadsheets - Become slow and unwieldy with large datasets, often freezing or becoming difficult to manage as the size grows.
  2. Installing and configuration a database and learning how to use it is more complicated than just reading and writing data to a file.  What are some important reasons that makes a database a useful investment of time? 
    1. A few reasons I think databases are a useful investment of time are Security, Scalability and Data Integrity/Accuracy. Security: Databases offer robust security features, including user authentication, role-based access control, and encryption, which ensure that only authorized users can access and manipulate data. Spreadsheets often lack such advanced security measures. Scalability: As organizations grow and the amount of data increases, databases provide the ability to scale both in terms of data volume and performance. Unlike spreadsheets, which become slow and inefficient with large datasets, databases are designed to handle vast amounts of data efficiently. Data Integrity/Accuracy: Databases enforce rules (constraints) to maintain data integrity, ensuring that data is accurate, consistent, and error-free. This is crucial when working with critical business data.
  3. What do you want to learn in this course that you think will be useful in your future career? 
    1. I think learning SQL and more about databases is my main goal in this course. I've seen quite a few jobs that look for knowledge in SQL/databases so I know it's going to be very beneficial to my career. I'm fairly new to SQL and databases so every day is filled with knowledge and challenges. I don't have any specific asks of this course as of yet so I'm devouring everything I'm learning.

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