Monday:
As an introduction to Databases, We were group into 6 or 7 members randomly by counting. we were all given an exercise pretending to be consultants for a certain company. He gave us a list of Cars: the brands, the number manufactured, the number sold, the sales each year for every brand, and the cities they sold in. We were given questions to gather certain data such as how many cars were sold during a certain, What brand of cars made the most money in a year, What cities did were certain car brands dominant and how many were sold there, etc. Each question must be completed in 5 minutes. We we did all our best with our full cooperation but sadly, no group was perfect. We had less time to do stuff and our reports were inaccurate. We all incurred negative points.
Then Sir Oli showed us an example of a database system with query. He explained to us that this System does the same job we did. Only, it releases reports in less than a minute and are incredibly accurate because there are no man made errors, IBA NA TALAGA TECHNOLOGY!
Wednesday:
This is the day where we focused on the topic of Storage Devices, but first Sir Oli made an ending story to finish our topic about databases. He made us recall the Y2K issue that was feared during the Millenium's arrival.
Dito ko na nalaman yung totoong issue ng Y2k. Akala ko end of the world yun eh as in gugunaw na mundo sa year na toh, literally. It was actually a big problem for Programmers and Database Admins because the year will become 2000 and the numbers will be zeroes which will cause a very FATAL logical errors because systems that do a formula for their reports that require the year: such as banks, offices, accounting firms etc. will cause an unreasonable and inaccurate data. Programmers had to do massive re-programming of their Math codes to avoid the zeroes from causing a worldwide chaos. Ofcourse, nobody would want their sales to be zeroes or the amount of their bank accounts to be zero. La Salle faced this problem too, they didn't want all the ID Numbers of future students to become all 00000000 and so on.
Programmers started to act immediately since 1992. An 8 year preparation to counter the Y2k Conspiracy. Sir Oli even told us that many programmers didn't have a vacation during new year's eve because the programmers and Database Developers had to observe what will happen to the functionality of their system when the clock strikes 12. Luckily there are countries that conquered the Y2K issue but there were unfortunate countries who didn't. The Philiipines successfully evaded the Y2k. Natalo pa natin Australia, which failed to beat Y2K.
OKAY BACK TO STORAGE DEVICES, One of the interesting things I learned was the sizes of floppy disks. Floppy disks before were the sizes of envelopes then they gotten smaller and smaller till they were no longer used and new storage devices were made. But as time goes on, the storage devices' capacity increases but the size decreases from a enveloped size floppy disk that can store only bytes to palm-fit flash disk that can store Gigabytes of files.
This goes to show that for Storage Devices:
Physical Size Decreases = Storage Capacity Increases
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