alexadler blog

Group member

Apparently, the project did create some kind of confusion and frustration among our team member. Especially after the presentation when some other groups did a really great job, some of our group members started to get worried about our own websites and database and they thought that this class is going to lower their overall grade. Conflicts started to emerge, however, after a series of explanation, patience and comfort by other team members, the incident was resolved.

Actually, I am just feeling the same but didn't voice it out. I did worry about our grades. Even if we gave our best already, when compared with others' work, we are clearly a little bit behind. Would the outcome of our grade really be greatly affected by our incompentency of doing a better job....?

Project

Yesterday, after some group discussion and meeting with our professor, we made a big progress in terms of understanding how our second project is going to look like. We have also taken a large step forward and completed the first part of our work. In XSQL 5 and 6, the class tried to teach us something more indepth and  complicated to make the outlook of our tables more appealing on the web and also to add more functionality into our website and become more user-friendly. This Project is really valuable to me because it encouraged me to think in the users' perspective. For this project in particular, I really can't help controlling my excitment when I can foresee that the people in the company that we serve can actually input their data via the web, which is a much more easier way for them, without touching the more complex oracle stuff. I really can't wait to see how our result can benefit them.

ER Diagram

So far, all the ER diagrams that we have learnt in class consist of about 10 entity types, and each is associated with at least two or three other entity types. However, for our project, the nature of the business that we are dealing with (some kind of a funding organization) doesn't allow us to build such a linkage among entities. The reason is that most of the other entity types are associated with the "Donor's program" entity type in a 1-to-Many relationship, resulting a lot of attributes (foreign keys to other table)in the "Donor's program" table, and leaving just one or at most two attributes in other tables.
I am kind of frustrated by this situation because the resulting ER diagram seems too simple when compared to the ER diagram we learned in class: all entity types just links to a common table. If this is really the case, what should we do?

Test Post

This is a test post.