OK, this is ridiculous people! I must apologize to my "phantom readers" and guinea pig x (who aparently reads my blog) for not posting anything is over a week now. I've had a rough couple of weeks, accident, death....LIFE!!! Anyways, I'm thankful that I am still here and I'm going to continue to make my contirbutions.
Dr. Mohan finally reached around to some of the tools we use in managing the data that we're given. He started talking about various DMBS, such as MS Access, MySQL, DB2, Oracle etc. I'm a bit familiar with some of these technologies and I mmust admit I sort of have a liking for them. However, the bigger picture is coming into view now as it relates to WHY we should record data and the process it takes to be formed into information. It's important to record data simply because it helps you keep track of all that's going on. If there were no records of anything, there'd be chaos (or more chaos in some cases) I'm sure. So, one way that we've seen that this can be done is to use a databse. We went through the hierarchy of data, which sounds something like this. A bit can either be 1 or 0, ie. it can either be on or off. This concept was adopted from electronics I understand as electronic items can either be turned on or turned off. Next, we have a byte. A byte consists of 8 bits and a byte is also known as a character. eg. of a character is A-Z, a-z,0-9 and special characters which make up the ASCII convention. A field is a set of characters or a group of characters and a record is not only that vinyl disc that people keep talking about, but it is also a set of related fields. A file is a group of related records and a database stores related files. So back to what I was saying about DBMS. When collection data that is then input into a database, these tools can be used to 'mine' information out of it so that better decisions can be made, specific details can be found for an item or student. Thank God for DBMS. Who knows where we woulda been without them, huh? The important foundation i was talking about however was finding out about the business before you begin to caputre data like a mad person. The information that MAY NOT be relevant to the organization and MIGHT just cause you and your employer frustration. So i'm glad that Dr. Mohan spoke about businesses sooooo much in the beginning of the course. :)