CST Week 4

 Five things I've learned in the course so far.

1. How to modify basic querying to get exact results and organize them too. Using key words such as SELECT, FROM, and WHERE is easy enough, but after having learned to use additional qualifiers and arguments like age < 21 AND age > 65 to further refine results has made SQL feel so much more robust.

2. Baseline knowledge of how Tables, Schema, and Tuples work. While I knew SQL is a database language that can be used to store and retrieve data, the inner workings of it were never clear to me. After following the labs and building methods that work with a Schema and Tuple's the inner workings of SQL make more sense.

3. JOIN tables. Being able to use SQL to compare and combine tables in different ways makes organizing data much easier. Inner join allows for combining Tables by selecting only the matching rows between the two, where as Outer join combines the full set of rows from both tables. This can be further defined using Left and Right join modifiers to precisely select which rows from each table. 

4. Relational vs non-relational databases. A non-relational database stores information in flexible formats so that it can be manipulated on a whim more easily but lacks the robustness of a relational database. A relational database stores its information using Schemas and uses indexing to allow for quick lookup of information without having to scan the whole database.

5. ERD design. How to take a concept for a database and all the requirements it may have and build out a diagram that demonstrates the relationships between each piece. Using these diagrams to plot out how the information found within a database may relate to one another.


Three things I still have questions about

1. How to identify the most efficient methods for querying? How do I know if my queries are optimal?

2. How to design a database in the most effective way? How do I take advantage of indexing to guarantee I am building a database that is efficient?

3. Can multiple databases be used in conjunction? Is there ways to take information from one database and use it in another? Think like joining tables, but instead with whole databases.

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