Big Dog

The Project Begins

I'm looking forward to starting the project finally. ER Diagrams and normalization are fine, but now we finally get do use them in a context that can be fun and interesting while providing experience and growth dealing with database development and management. I work with databases and spreadsheets everyday through my job, but this project will allow me to experiment freely and try some new applications and ideas. This should be a fun project and I hope everyone in my team is looking forward to starting.

Project #1

I was just wondering if we were going to go over the project requirements and expectations in class because I have a few questions

Ternary Relationships

I'm a little confused as to how to read Ternary Relationships from an ER diagram. I understand that a ternary relationship relates three entity types through an associative entity type that usually describes some sort of action. For a relationship involving the associative entity do all three entity types need to be involved? If anyone has any advice or a simple way to explain how to read ternary relationships that would be much appreciated.

Business Information Technology

Business Information Technology

I agree that with huge databases, 4NF would be very difficult to incorporate. I personally work with databases and right now I'm working on a database that contains information on Japanese Corporations over the past twenty years. There are somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 entries and 50 plus field names. It would be almost impossible to delete all the redundency in that database. I think for sure that 4NF would be a feat for corporations with thousands of entries

RSS and Advertising

In the article RSS Feeds Can Build Web Traffic, but Fence sitters Note Problem it seems many online services are hesitiant to adopt RSS because of two reason. One, it will take away advertising from their front-end homepages and second it will take away potential subscribers. I agree with these online services because if I could get updated news right when I get on the internet then that decreases the time I have to go to each site and look for the articles that interest me. It is a matter of time for me and I assume many college students. If Rss feeds could send updates directly to us we could control to some degree what we wanted to view. For online services this doesn't help because why pay for something when you could get it for free. RSS seems like a benefit to consumers, but maybe not to online services. I guess I need to know more about the strucutre of RSS. I have many of the same questions as jrtrana in regards to RSS.

ESPN and RSS

It occurred to me that RSS feeds would be a good medium for the transferring of up to the date sporting news. So I went to ESPN and found addresses to RSS feeds ranging from college football to the NBA to NHL. I copied the links to my MyYahoo homepage like we did before in class and now I get RSS feeds with up to the date news on college football and the NFL. If your interested in sports and want to set this up click here and this will send you to the ESPN RSS page.

Interesting Blogging Article

This article basically sums up the idea of blogging and what makes it such a unique way of communicating. The author touches on a lot of features with blogging and highlights the transformation of blogging from a trivial past time into a medium of transfering information quickly and up to the date. The best line written in the whole article however is the last one where she states, "as with free speech itself, what we say isn't as important as the system that enables us to say it." I think that the author hits it right on the head with the statement. It is not necessarily what we say through blogs, but the technology itself that makes blogs so effective and useful. This article was very helpful in further defining the idea of blogging.

Blogging

I have never really done anything like blogging before. It seems to be a very easy way to communicate quickly to a lot of people. I'm sure this class is going to interesting and fun.

Ross

Instead of using 100 million for new facilities for the business school, Mr. Ross should just pay for the tuition of BBA's for the next 20 years or more. That seems to be the best way to spend the money in my opinion being we probably won't be here to see the new changes this money will bring. Wouldn't that be sweet

BIT 320

Let the blogging begin