Today I wanted to write about a challenge I’ve faced this week while working on a task for the Capstone project. It involves databases, so first I want to reflect on my knowledge of databases I’ve built over the years. In my previous degree I was an Information systems and Marketing major at the University of New Hampshire. To Earn the information systems major, some of my classes involved basic technical concepts one of which was databases. I took an introduction to database management systems course which helped me gain a grasp on how databases were designed and the basics of how to manipulate them. Throughout the class we had to design a very small database ERD and also write SQL queries to extract the data. At this point I had a general idea of how to design a small database but was not confident in my querying abilities of designing anything more complex.
Fast forward to Fall of 2021 when I took introduction to web development. In this class I learned that there was such a thing as a non-relational database. Although I stumbled through building the final full stack project of MongoDB I now at least had some idea of how a database actually fit into an application. At this point I still really didn’t get what an ORM was and was very confused by the use of MongoDB’s ORM called Mongo.
The next quarter I was a undergraduate learning assistant for Introduction to Web Development and I also took Introduction to database systems. This combo greatly improved my understand of how databases should be designed. Introduction to databases forced me to create a full stack app and connect it to a database without any guideline or template that I previously used as a crutch in Introduction to web development. Being a ULA for Introduction to web development forced me to learn how to explain database fundamentals to others as well.
Fast forward to the present day, I’ve been tasked with primarily focusing on the database area of my teams project. Thus far I had drafted an entity relationship diagram and created a model using node.js ORM Sequalae. These two steps were relatively straightforward but I realized I still have a gap in my knowledge. How do I actually set up a database from scratch so I can test that my model works. Previously in introduction to web development this part was done for you and during my group project in Introduction to databases my group partner set up the database. I am hoping to spend today and tomorrow ironing out this step and figuring out how to test my model I’ve created. Once I do this I am left wondering, what will the next hole in my database knowledge be? This also left me thinking, should computer science degree programs put more focus on the often neglected area of databases?
