Go Blue

Big Dog: recursive realtionship

Big Dog: recursive realtionship

I am so excited to be done with this project. It has been a long weekend full of jEdit and Dance Marathon work. Unfortunately, it's Sunday night and we aren't completely finished yet. We have been having problems with our recursive table, which Big Dog already blogged about here.
Jason, was Bud's answer to our problem helpful for you? I'm sorry to say that I still am not sure how we can fix our table. Does anyone else have any advice? Or, Bud, are you by any chance in your office at all on Mondays? Besides that, I think our project is looking pretty great. Also, I was wondering where we need to turn in the hardcopy of our project. Will there be a box by your office?

P.S. Check out my new pink and purple weblog. Isn't it pretty?

Blogging Assignment in 301

I just wanted to share my latest BIT 301 assignment with the class. We are to make an ER diagram of a blog. Or, as the assignment puts it: "Assume you have made it through the analysis phase of a project to implement a new blogging system for a political consultancy. (Short for Web log, a blog is a Web page that serves as a publicly accessible journal for an individual. Webopedia.com) Your job is to develop an ER Diagram and table structure." For the other BBA1s in this class, isn't it cool to be so ahead of everyone else? I love it, as I never feel this way in my other classes. And for the BBA2s, did you also have an assignment like this last year? Now I just have to decide if I'm going to help out my friends who have no idea how to do the assignment or not!

Foreign Key Issues

I am having trouble with creating a table for our project. I am trying to write the code for an associative entity in our E-R diagram in which the primary key is the two fields that are primary keys for the tables that it connects (foreign keys). However, I am getting an error when I try to name two different fields as a primary key. A member in my group suggested naming one a primary key and the other "not null", but is there a different way?

M Go Blue: Exam Response

M Go Blue: Exam Response

Even though M Go Blue: Exam Response's attempt to trackback to my trackback to his original Midterm Exam post did not work, I still wanted to trackback to his try as I agree that it is very cool. It is like we are having a conversation but the whole class is here to listen as well! Also, now with Sage, I realized that M Go Blue had responded to a previous post I had written comparing SQL and C++ and I didn't even know! I'm glad that the class is using trackbacks more often now as it is a shame to miss someone's response to a post you have written.

As far as my last comment about the exam carrying the most weight in our grades, I wanted to clarify. I definitely agree with M Go Blue's statement, "I think it is important to keep up with this blogging component, because not doing so is certainly a way to negatively differentiate from the class" and if I implied that I didn't think that blogging and projects are important, I did not mean to. In every class at the college level, the exams usually count the most but all the other aspects of the class are equally important as they are the way to learn the material and get the most out of the class. I plan on doing my best with the blogosphere as well as the projects, but the exams are the fair way to be tested on our understanding and should be the biggest portion of our grades (and I believe they are).

P.S. When I picked up my exam this morning I did not get an answer key, only my test. Did other people get one or is there a different place to get the answers?

2nd Attempt at a Trackback

M Go Blue: Midterm Exam

Well, Bud must have read my mind because after posting my unsuccessful trackback attempt right before class today, I was excited when we used some class time to go over this concept. So here is my second attempt which will hopefully work. I am trackbacking to M Go Blue: Midterm Exam as I disagree with him comparing the blogging component of our grade to the exam component. Although the test is 26% and the blogging is 20%, I still think the exam will have a lot more effect on our final grade then the blogging. With the Business School's grading, the assignments that everyone gets the same grade for usually get canceled out. In fact, it seems that most people will get the full 20% from the blogosphere, and then the two projects will only be somewhat distributed since the group members will all receive the same grade, so the test will play the largest part in our final grade. Don't you think?

EXAM & My Failed Attempt at a Trackback

I just wanted to take this chance to respond to everyone's discussions of the exam by trying my first trackback! With help from Tranquilidad's post, it doesn't seem that hard. Anyway, I wanted to especially agree with Hail to the Victors: Exam Results.... post. I found it hard envision these made-up scenarios on the exam for the E-R diagrams. I unfortunately thought that because of the possibility for ambiguity, Bud would steer clear of E-R diagrams somewhat and focus on SQL and normalization. Boy was I wrong! Taking that test definitely made my head hurt. I actually went through the E-R part once and got an answer for each, then went back through and got a different answer than my original for almost all of them! I know that can't be a good sign...so we will see I guess when we get our tests back. Ok now, for the trackback. Tranquilidad's post says, "There should be a box at the lower right hand corner of your new post that says "Send a Trackback to these addresses" This is where you copy and paste the trackback URL of the post you want to respond to". Hmm...I can't find that. I must be missing something. Is it because I am not using the QuickPost from the website but instead using typepad.com? Help!

The DISTINCT Operator

I had a lot more trouble doing the chapter 4 exercises than doing the chapter 3 exercises as I found all the different ways to write everything confusing. One concept that I don't understand is when you need to use the DISTINCT operator and when it is not necessary. For example, in chapter 4 question 9 you use a subquery and distinct is not necessary - you get only the two names no matter if you use it or not. However, in the next question, number 10, you don't use a subquery and you need distinct. If you don't use distinct, the outcome will be Juan Perez listed twice. Is there a general rule that whenever you use subqueries you don't need to use the distinct and everything will be automatically listed only once? I have a feeling it is more on a problem-by-problem basis...

Yay for Search

I just wanted to express my excitement with the search function on our website. I have spent my entire day catching up on SQL and watching Michigan football and have gotten a lot done. However, when I began this morning and was installing all of the necessary programs on my computer at home I could not figure out how to make everything work and was getting very nervous that I would have to go to a school computer to do the work. My problem was that I could not connect the jEdit to SSH Secure Shell as the "Connect to Secure FTP Server" wasn't appearing under the plugins drop down list. After a while of unsuccessfully playing around with jEdit, I decided to use the search function for the first time to search other people's blogs and see if anyone else had the same problem. After typing "jEdit" in the search box I quickly saw a note from wizdumb saying "Also the first time you attempt to connect to the FTP secure server you need to first go to pluggins, pluggins manager and select FTP from the list." How helpful!! It was exactly what I needed to know! So, my advice to everyone is whenever you have a problem, search the blogs because it is likely that someone else has had the same problem as well.

Our first meeting

This afternoon we had our first group meeting after a long week of finance and economics exams and I am feeling much more confident about our project. Our group, teamBIT, is making a database for Dance Marathon. Here is a link to the site if you are interested in participating or learning more about it. Originally when we were discussing if this would be feasible, we weren't sure if there would be enough information to make a 12 entity diagram. However, after writing our first E-R diagram today, we realized how wrong we were. There were so many different parts of this organization that could benefit from being in a table that we were forced to pick and choose which information would be best to use. We successfully created an E-R diagram relating different aspects and information about the actual dancers and teams, but could easily create another whole diagram for the financial part of the organization and maybe even another for the food and entertainment aspects of the marathon. After trying to organize all of the data for this project, I can't even imagine what it would be like to create a database for a real business or a huge corporation!

SQL vs. C++

When reading chapter 2 of the SQL book, I kept wondering about the similarities SQL had to other programming languages. The introduction stated that this language is "one of the most popular and widely used languages for retrieving and manipulating database data", but is it used for other things too? I have had some past experience with programming in BASIC and a fair amount with C++. Are these languages similar to SQL? Some of the commands in the chapter brought back some EECS 183 memories...especially the CHAR command. Will my knowledge of C++ be helpful when using SQL or just make things more confusing? When searching online about the two languages I found this page to be interesting as it shows the two data types side by side. It looks like the languages in fact might be very similar.