Week 19 (CST363 - Week 1)

1. Relational database tables and spreadsheets look similar with both having rows and columns.  What are some important differences between the two?
2. Installing and configuration a database and learning how to use it is more complicated that just reading and writing data to a file.  What are some important reasons that makes a database a useful investment of time? 
3. What do you want to learn in this course that you think will be useful in your future career? 

The main differences between a database and a spreadsheet is that databases provide way more overall structure, and can keep track of records across many different files, and build relationship sets across the data inside the tables. You can build incredibly sophisticated queries to pull data from a database that automatically updates as new data is added.

I value the ability to query the data alone, making making it very worth my time. Depending on how their set up (I assume) they are intended to perform with very large data-sets, can help maintain consistency in a data-set, and make collaborating with others to build data much easier.

I have been dabbling in a miniature-version of SQL in the form of dataview queries in my Obsidian vault, an app I use for note-taking and tracking habits, hobbies, activities, and my schedule. They recently integrated a database system plugin into their core app, so I've been spending a bit of time with that as well. In my career, I'm not exactly certain how databases will come into the particular software engineering role that I'm pursuing, but since it involves working on a system that collects, organizes, and evaluates the performance statistics of semiconductor devices, I would imagine that databases will play a role in sorting the results, managing loaded devices, handling vector patterns, and so on.