Mike Limpus

Week in Review This first week of Introduction to Operating Systems had a lot of information to unpack. For the lab portion of this module, I wrote my very first Bash script. It was interesting to see the differences in a scripting language like this and a full fledged programming language. Some of the weaknesses … Read more

The Three Most Important Things I Learned The most important thing I learned in this course was definitely databases themselves. I had basically no prior understanding of them before entering this course. Second, learning SQL forced me to learn to look past many years of experience in C-style languages and actually learn a new paradigm, … Read more

What is a data warehouse and why is it important to have another version of the data in a data warehouse? A data warehouse is a type of database which is designed for long term, largely static use. They are used for analysis of trends or referencing specific pieces of data from a long time … Read more

When would you use a relational database such as MySQL or Oracle versus some other NoSQL database?   Generally speaking, I would use a relational database in situations where data size and types are somewhat fixed and the user is entering data in a form-like interface. On the other hand, I would use NoSQL databases in … Read more

The web site “Use the Index Luke” has a page on “slow indexes”.  If indexes are supposed to speed up performance of query,  what is meant by a slow index? An index is fast partially due to the underlying tree data structure, which when optimized properly are generally efficient to traverse when searching. The term … Read more

When coding a Java program that will perform a SELECT statement that return multiple rows, what are the steps needed? The first is to make a connection to the database and the last is close the connection. What are the other steps? Outside of these steps, you must also create a Prepared Statement, optionally insert … Read more

Someone described normalization of a DB design as “a column depends on the key, the whole key, and nothing but the key, so help me Codd.” Explain in your words what 3rd normal form is and why it is important. The third normal form is a design pattern. It gives the guideline that databases’ columns … Read more

Week 2 Prompt SQL has the flexibility to join tables on any column(s) using any predicate (=, >, < ). As long the column(s) are type compatible. 98% of the time the join uses primary key of one table, foreign key of the other table and equal predicate. Think of example where joining on something … Read more

Relational tables and spreadsheets look similar with both having rows and columns. What are some important differences between the two? A relational table cannot have duplicate rows and must have unique identifying names, whereas a spreadsheet does not have these rules, as they can be distinguished by their absolute position on the sheet. What are … Read more

Hindsight is 20/20 Going into this class, I would have a few recommendations for the next cohort. First, study up on your Java! Not having to learn the language from scratch makes this class very digestible. Second, plan a good collaborative workflow for your team. My team used GitHub and Slack, and the process of … Read more