CS Online Weekly Updates

Similarities Both MongoDB and MySQL are used as database management systems to store, retrieve, and manipulate data. They can index, query, and be used with Java Python or JavaScript. They both also allow for user authentication Differences MySQL uses tables with FIXED schema, yet MongoDB has a NoSQL database which is a flexible database. It allows for nested fields and dynamic schemas.  When would you choose one over the other?  I would choose MongoDB when the data I am using is a lot of data and the data is changing consistently. Anything with user generated content I would have to choose Mongo since it can store complex data. I Would choose MySQL for applications that are used in transactions, or items complex relationships like foreign keys.

Summary of the week's learning This week in CST 363 we learned about imperative and  declarative language. Imperative uses control flow statements unlike declarative. Much of my college career I have heard of object oriented programming, which my teachers and professors say is what we are doing, but now I know object oriented programming is actually imperative language. We also learned how to connect our SQL Workbench and our java IntelliJ programs so we could access the database through SQL and do all the updates, and inserts, and etc. This is big because we also access and change multiple rows at a time with PreparedStatements.  Another thing that was not really discussed in the week but something new to me was using the localhost to run our java program. I have never done that before and I am sure I will be using it a lot, but it was something cool and exciting to me to learn about.

If indexes are supposed to speed up performance of query,  what does the author mean by a slow index?  The author means that although indexes are supposed to speed up queries, there are times index lookups can be slow. The index isn't broken but the index is not being used properly. For example, If there are multiple entries in a tree, traversing it can take much longer if there are duplicates. A "slow index" means that even with an index, the query can be slow due to the amount of data that still needs to be read like in matching rows or scattered table data.