CST 311 Week 1

Week 1

This week has been great. I've learned a ton of new information already. I'm nervous I won't be able to retain it all for the exams. I didn't make notes while watching the lectures this week, but in the following weeks I'm going to start putting together quick reference sheets. When I took this week's quiz, I found that I had to go back to find information and I had no idea where it was.

This week we learned how the internet is all connected and had a quick overview on how it operates by sendings packets between hosts. We also dove into understanding throughput in a connection and what the delays in sending a packet are.

Delay times for a packet on a network seem to be the most notable information for this week:

d_end-to-end = d_proc + d_queue + d_trans + d_prop

d_proc : This is where the packet is processed. Here, the bits are checked for errors and the output link is determined.
d_queue : Time a packet spends waiting in the output link queue to be put on the output link. This time depends on how busy the router is.
d_trans : L/R, where L is the packet length and R is the link bandwidth. This is the time spent placing the packet onto the output link.
d_prop : d/s, where d is the length of the physical length and s is the propagation speed. This is the time spent on the link itself.

CST 363 Week 8

Week 8

This week is our final week. We had a final exam and have been working on a group project, which is to design a database. I've been really happy with my group for this assignment. I felt like everyone came together and really put in a lot of effort. Our database is quite large (11 tables!), but I'm happy with the thought that was put into it. As for the final exam, it was a bit more challenging than I was anticipating and I was pretty discouraged that I didn't do as well as I thought I had.

This course had decent content and it was nice to get to know a new database system (Oracle), but I think this content could have been presented with other databases that are more accessible to everyone, like MySQL or PostgreSQL, since we didn't go into anything that was too Oracle specific and I think that the students could learn to write sequence tables if they need to later on when they need to.

CST 363 Week 7

Week 7

The material this week was pretty easy, at least easy to follow. The string manipulation we did was very similar to string manipulation in other regular programming languages. Most of the links were to regular Oracle database documentation and it's all pretty straight forward there. Overall, it's pretty difficult to read documentation when you aren't looking to do something specific so I had a difficult time staying focused there.

This week we covered the following ideas:

• Creating a sequence table to be used for automatically incrementing values in a table we're already using. The most basic command to get up and running is CREATE TABLE sequenceName. The user utilizes this by calling for the next value, like INSERT INTO tableName VALUES (sequenceName.NextVal, …); (professor's example).
• Creating aliases for columns. The user has the power to change column names, but they can also temporarily display alternate names just for the temporary use of a particular display. This can be done by adding the alias directly after the column name in a select statement or by specifying "as", like SELECT EName as "Student's Name" FROM STUDENT or SELECT ENAME Stu_Name FROM STUDENT. This can also be done for tables, like SELECT * FROM STUDENT s, CLASS c WHERE s.CLASS_ID = c.ID;
• Adding padding to the left or the right of a particular string with "lpad" and "rpad".
• Removing extra whitespace characters to the left and right hand side of a string with "ltrim" and "rtrim".
• Using "substr" to get a subsection of a string.
• Utilizing "sysdate" to show the current date. The sysdate variable can be incremented up and down by the day by just adding/removing an integer, like "sysdate+1" to get tomorrow's date. The date can also be formatted for the column to provide more details as well as compared to other existing dates in the database.

CST 363 Week 6

Week 6

The first section of this week covered SQL queries using group by, having, and order by. Last week I didn't know that the reading for this wasn't supposed to be read yet, so I had already done the reading for these by the time this week rolled around. They're pretty basic and extremely useful, but I honestly haven't used having in my regular work and I can see it being very useful in some cases.

We also covered prompting the user for inputs and saving their inputs to variables for use later in the script. These are done by using the keywords "accept" and "prompt". To get entry from the user, you could do something like:

ACCEPT vUserInput PROMPT 'Enter your input: ';

The variables are accessed by prefixing them with an "&":

PROMPT Your input: &vUserInput 

Finally, we covered sub-queries. They're basically all just a query added into a SQL query in parenthesis instead of using variables, like you might in a regular programming language.

I've enjoyed that this week has been more hands-on. All of our assignments this week have allowed me to utilize the new computer I purchased and also use this Oracle database that many of us worked very hard to get installed.

CST 363 Week 5

Week 5

This week was heavily focused on entity relationships and modeling the relationships using ER diagrams. The two diagrams we learned are the Chen Model and the Crow's Foot Model. I've played around with modeling database systems using the Crow's Foot Model in the past. It was nice to learn all of the additional bits that I didn't know (like a dashed line indicates that a relationship is weak). Also, the Chen Model is interesting to know, too. It provides a very quick overview of a database.

I'm hoping that we can refine these ER diagram skills and get some hands-on practice in the next couple of weeks. I'd like to make use of the computer that I purchased for this course.

Overall, the material this week was dense and I'm still uncertain about how to interpret some of the "business rules" that were provided in class. I think that there are some odds n' ends that could be left up to interpretation, so I'm hoping that it's recognized that way when the homework from this week is graded.