Learning Blog

 The three more important things I learned in this course were database design, transaction management, and data storage.  The database design chapter was very informative. When working on projects in the past, it was relatively easy to figure out the main entities and attributes I was going to use. But the hard part was always visualizing the relationships between them and the issues they can create in database tables if they're badly set up. I think this part of the course gave me a good amount of knowledge on how to avoid these pitfalls. I found the section on transaction management pretty interesting. It reminded me of material we learned in CSUMB's networking course. Particularly about how networking systems manage several competing network requests, and how internet traffic is managed. I found the section on data storage interesting as well. I wasn't aware that partitions and storage could be optimized to the degree shown in the book chapters.

 What the author means by slow indexes is that indexes are supposed to speed up look ups on a data table. However, there are aspects of indexes that can slow down searches. For example if we're looking for several different cells that match the value we're looking for, the index has to traverse the tree to get to our first match, but but then has to follow the chain of nodes to capture all the matches. This can take pretty long if there are many table rows that match our search value. Also, the accessing of the table itself can increase the time it takes to search for a value as well. It seems consistent with our text's and how it recommends approaches to database design that avoid redundancy. The more unique our value, the faster it is to find all instances of it.