Week 3 - reflective post

Databases - love them or hate them, you must use them! Since a database is really any piece of information which contains more than one record which is logically organized, that means that we are using database in everyday life even outside of IT. Take for example a grocery shopping list, believe or not, it is a database. Even that to-do list is a small database. Since most of use have only few records in our daily databases, a small piece of paper will do for our database management needs.

Now imagine an organization with a need to organize thousands, or maybe millions or sometimes billions of records, I think that would have a hard time with a pen and a small piece of paper as their database and database management tools. This is where relational database management systems or RDBMS come into play.

RDBMS systems can help organize and automate many tasks that used to be performed manually in the past. What it took days or months using manual work, now can be done in minutes if not in seconds using modern computers.

Data mining is another powerful tool that is using databases and that is several of them at the same time. By correlating information from different databases about same person, data mining can uncover things that were previously impossible to know. So, databases (as with anything else) can be used to do useful things, but they can be also used to do some really bad things (especially with data mining).