What is my favorite technology from my project and why? What is it used for? How could it be made better?

My project is the Online Trading Card Game Maker app and my favorite technology we are using is our MySQL database hosted on OSU’s classmysql servers. It’s used as our relational database management system or RDBMS. In our particular application, it’s used in anything from tracking user data to housing the health points of a particular card. It’s my favorite technology in the project for a number of reasons.

First is the fact that it’s cross-platform compatible. It’s able to run under a number of different operating systems which allows for maximum flexibility for collaboration.

It has a high-degree of reliability, both in terms of it’s design and in terms of it’s track record in adoption. It’s been used in production environments by many companies for many years, in part due to it’s strict adherence to ACID properties. These properties include Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability. They serve to ensure that database transactions are processed reliably and that data integrity is in turn maintained. This is important for applications where there’s an emphasis on consistency, such as certain types of games.

It’s accessible user interface is nice as well. The option is there to access it with either the terminal or instead make use of PHPAdmin and have a GUI. This adds to it’s ease of use which is nice for beginner users such as myself.

To that end, the community support is another feature that is appealing about it. It is robust and part of that reason is due to the fact that MySQL is open-source. It’s source code is available to all so transparency is a value to the MySQL product.

Despite it’s many perks, it does have areas where it could stand to be made better. This includes better support for the JSON file format. This could potentially look like more efficient storage and retrieval or better querying capabilities. We were discussing using JSON files for images with our database but believe it may be too complex.

Another component that could stand to use some improvement would be native full-text search. Focusing on this area could in theory lead to more sophisticated search functionalities and therefore enhance the querying capabilities of the databases.

Overall though, it’s a tool that does it’s intended function well and I’m glad to be able to work with it.