JA7. Advanced Database Web-Application Development¶
Discuss the week’s activities and your observations¶
This was the 7th week of this course and it was about advanced database web application development. We learned about types of web applications, e-commerce, legacy systems, data warehouses, business intelligence, and data mining.
The discussion assignment asked about the advantages and disadvantages of Materialized views and how they help in reducing response time, reducing the load on servers, and working as a way of controlling access to data in a database; but yet they still consume extra storage, not supported by all DBMSs, and refreshing them requires extra time and resources.
The written assignment asked about creating a classification tree for course grades; which was an interesting exercise. I had to create a classification tree that would classify grades from A to F and also explain how to navigate through the tree.
Discuss the role of the data warehouse in business intelligence¶
Data warehouses are the final destination for data that is collected from different sources (including databases), and then these data are transformed, aggregated, analyzed, and organized in a way that helps business intelligence (BI) make informed decisions and predictions based on the organization’s history.
A warehouse is a database with the special purpose of generating complex reports and performing data analysis. It is a database that is optimized for read-only operations, and it is modeled to support decision-making processes.
Usually, the warehouse will contain a copy of the data from the customer-facing database with relationships between data removed or tweaked a bit to make the data more suitable for analysis. The data is also aggregated and summarized to make it easier to analyze.
The response time for queries in a warehouse is usually much slower than in a database, but it usually does not matter as long as the results are correct and help in making informed decisions. An employee can wait for a few seconds or minutes for a report to be generated, but the report will help the employee make a decision that will affect the organization’s bottom line.
References¶
- Silberschatz, A., Korth, H.F., & Sudarshan, S. (2001). Database System Concepts (4th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Available at Database System Concepts 4th Edition By Silberschatz-Korth-Sudarshan.pdf Chapeter 24: Transaction Processing.