Cody Codes Code

This week's material covered the concept of data warehousing and OLAP database design. Compared to the last two weeks of material, I am finally starting to understand how SQL and databases work on a large scale, in addition to learning more about the technical details of SQL. After reading about data warehousing, I realized that I have always pictured large scale databases as "warehouses" of some sort, even before I knew anything about SQL or database design. I find how data is processed separately in a "warehouse" which is then sliced and diced into cubes, and then finally "served" to users sending multiple queries as a fascinating and efficient way as to how data is moved around the Internet and private servers and databases. In hindsight, some of the simple databases I had to design for a previous Android class could've been much improved if I had known about the concepts of data warehousing -- mobile applications often involve large numbers o...

This week in SQLand, I learned how to code subqueries, create databases, and work with some of SQL's more complex functionality over the base functions from last week. Subqueries are tricky, and can get complicated pretty quickly in certain situations. However, they are quite powerful because they allow the user to filter results to a finer degree than pure table joins with single "ON" conditions. I can already see myself using subqueries for our upcoming group project. I also learned about the levels of database normalization, and how to improve database efficiency and reduce data redundancy through good database design. I feel as if this is the most important part of SQL, and database programming in general - without a well designed or maintainable database, applications that rely on querying data (e.g. almost everything) are quite limited in their functionality, or in the worst case don't work at all. Lastly, the different of levels of normalization can signifi...