Database Systems
Completed: Spring 2023
Grade:B
Course Description
Representing information about real world enterprises using important data models including the entity-relationship, relational, and object-oriented approaches. Database design criteria, including normalization and integrity constraints. Implementation techniques using commercial database management system software and database connector APIs. Selected advanced topics such as query and transaction processing and index data structures.
Reflection
At this point in my degree my course schedule open up to allow me to take whatever elective I wanted. My immediate though was that databases seemed to be useful and everywhere around me. I did not let the 5000 level course number scare me and jumped in head first! As my grade shows I struggled more in this class that any class up until this point. It was not the material that I struggled with but the constant deadlines forcing me to code faster and harder than I ever had.
This course started out slow with introducing important ideas of database design. I mean it is important to design the database before you implement it after all. After several weeks of studying ER diagrams and the basics of relational databases we hopped straight into putting that information to practice. We started a partner project that took us through all the stages of database managment. We designed a database and drew up the ER diagram, we constructed the tables in mySQL, and built ourselves an API to integrate with a LMS provided by the instructional staff. By the end of the course we had a fully working canvas look-a-like.