CST363 - Week 4

Briefly summarize 5 things what you have learned in the course so far.

Prior to this class, I had minimal knowledge about databases, aside from a little from the previous Java class. So far, the basics of databases and writing queries is the first thing that comes to mind. We’ve also learned about the importance of data integrity through the use of primary keys, foreign keys, and constraints. Additionally, we covered how to use different join operations to combine data from various tables, as well as data normalization to further organize information and eliminate redundancy. Finally, we explored indexing and how it can improve the performance.

List at least 3 questions you still have about databases.

I’d be interested to know more about the differences between SQL and NoSQL, but this is something I will likely research on my own. I’m also curious whether SQL supports error handling similar to Java or other programming languages. I briefly searched this topic last week, and from what I found, it seems that error handling in SQL relies on conditionals rather than things like try-catch blocks. Lastly, I would like to gain a deeper understanding of how massive databases are maintained, as it seems quite daunting.