Week 4 Notes

•  I have heard about nothing but problems since Cloud Databases started to be introduced to the public for their use. My boyfriend works in IT and he says that the biggest problem with Clouds is security. You cannot secure something that is so easily accessible.
• Clouds may also save space initially, but they put huge pulls on the environment. They have to be housed in special storage areas with controlled environments and they usually are not kept in corners of the earth that are known for having cooler climates.
• In my mind a database is just a library shoved into a computer server. Instead of pulling a book off a shelf, you pull it off of the server, which may or may not be connected to the internet.
• In LIS we use a lot of entity-relationship models and they always make me want to punch a wall.
• Entity-relationship models remind me of flow-charts because that is pretty much what they are. I do not like the one in the Wikipedia article so here's a better one about bacon:

• I can see how entity-relationship models would be helpful to someone designing a database, but I think that they are only helpful to the person who created it. The ones that I run into are always so abstract that they're Greek to me.
• I'm a little confused about this thing called "atomicity." Even the definition is confusing. Someone please explain this!