I will talk about a new technology that I learned this term. For our project, we are building an animal adoption web app. We are using Google Cloud Datastore to store the data, which is a brand-new technology for me. Coincidently, I also take CS493 Cloud Development this semester, and in this class, we also use Google Cloud, which makes it much easier for me to implement the Google Cloud Datastore in our capstone project. 

Before this term, I only learned to use relational databases, where the data is organized in tables. Google Cloud Datastore is a non-relational database, which is document-oriented, and the data are stored in list order. After using the Google Cloud Datastore, I like non-relational databases better. First, a non-relational database, or NoSQL database, allows more flexibility in data storage because it is less structured in format. Unlike the relational database, there are no tables, rows, primary keys, or foreign keys in a non-relational database. Second, because of its flexibility, a non-relational database can store more varied types of data. Also, when you make a change, since the data model is very flexible, you don’t need to modify a schema.

After building a project with a non-relational database, I highly will implement it again to store the data for my next project.