Sunday, January 29, 2012

Week 4 Notes


The variety of databases shows the individual purposes for they serve. One piece of the article stood out to me, “Cloud Database”. The concept have become recurring theme in the news. The competing companies are pushing hard to integrate this concept into public consciousness.  There is a bank in Madrid, Spain had bought cloud program from Google- (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16486796). This might represent a step in the future of technology or it might die out.  The idea behind cloud technology is that the providers offer the access of the programs through the internet. It would allow the users to download necessary programs without going to different product. The goal of cloud computing is to make it easy for users to manage and less cumbersome to maintain. More information can be found at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing  
Clearly, this type of concept is not without pitfalls… like for instance; the virus could destroy a cloud program thus affecting dozens of computer servers. The challenge to maintain and protect data is greater in the cloud database.  Librarians should keep eye on advances in the field of technology. It might be a benefit for the library… to provide information and applications through the internet.   
It is bit hard for me to wrap my mind around the concept of 3 Normal Forms. With visual images, I felt I was missing something. However the Wikipedia entry on the entity relationship cleared some blocks off the concept of Three Normal Forms. I liked the visual example of the entity relationship, this painted better picture of the database. It is quite interesting to note that, entity relationship model focuses on building from scratch programs and not suited for existing and current programs. The existence of entity relationship model rests in the foundation of the current programs.  While the concept of Three Normal Forms focused on the part as how to make the program work in certain way.

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