I’m now through the third week of the MIS 766 course. It has continued to be a fairly low key course.

Week 2 covered logical design and implementation, which was a fairly straightforward and mechanical operation. Once you have the conceptual design, you can convert it into a collection of tables and relationships between those tables, which then becomes the foundation for building out your SQL code for the relational database. I’ve already seen some of these ideas in my own efforts to play with databases, and so the only thing that I got out of this was that it really helped me to formalize that knowledge. Instead of bumbling my way through in a disorganized manner, I now bumble my way through using a framework that helps me to keep track of which relationships require extra tables and which ones don’t.

Week 3 has been all SQL stuff. There were some early parts that were new to me, which mostly consisted of commands that are used to create and modify tables. But everything after that is stuff that I’ve used in my own experiences already. I know how to join tables and run basic queries, and so the assignments have been fairly easy practice sessions. We’re stepping into something that’s slightly new to me this week, as we started off with subqueries (which I’ve seen but never used).

The case studies have been rather interesting. The first one was about the use of a database in a non-profit setting in Canada. The next was about the use of predictive modeling as part of the strategy for the Gap. And the third was about the Target data breach from a few years ago. This week (and the last case study) is about Airbnb. I’ve found these to be interesting to read, though the class discussion posts have been mostly uninteresting. We have to respond to quite a few posts and it’s leading to very little discussion and mostly just a couple short sentences here and there that mostly just affirm what others have said. But I guess that’s just how it is.

The group project hasn’t had any work on it for a little while because nothing has been due. I think things will pick up this weekend because that’s leading into the final project time.

I also got an email from the MIS 761 instructor. This guy sounds like he’s going to make us work: “This is a graduate course and it is structured as such. The workload is fair, and you should learn a great deal if you challenge yourself accordingly.” So I’m expecting this to be about twice as much work as what I’ve been doing. I will probably read ahead in the book a little bit in advance.