Databases

Databases are something that all of us interact with on a daily basis but few of among us are familiar with anything other than the user interface.  The Access Science article did an exc3ellent job at describing the back end of how the relational databases work.  The information architecture logistics was interesting.  The hardware requirements for large scale databases with massive server farms are an area that sparks my interest. As an architectural engineer these server farms provide interesting and distinct challenges in designing the structures that contain the individual components involved.

The second article was about storing information digitally and some of the shortcomings and pit falls of this process. Media can degrade over time. This is logical to us when one thinks of traditional paper documents that must be kept at certain temperatures, relative humidity, and ultra violet levels. The same is true for digital media. The platters used in traditional computer hard drives have impact, magnetic, and other environmental factors that can degrade these over. Digital tape and flash media all are not immune to these shortcomings. The article talks about using redundancy in storing data and then using the metadata of the files in question to allow users to more quickly access the information stored in the digital medium.  Metadata is essentially the data about the data being stored and can be assigned to three major categories descriptive, facilitating resource identification and exploration; administrative; supporting resource management within a collection; structural, binding together the components of more complex information objects. This allows users to search through databases much faster by searching through much smaller files to find the relevant information. Databases can often become cumbersome but designing them correctly from the start can keep them very useful.