Comp 305-001/488-305: Database Administration

Spring 2017: Tuesdays, 4:15-6:45, Comm 010

Week 5

February 14


Homework 2: on Sakai, due Mar 1.

This past week this post appeared: blog.sagemath.com/2017/02/09/rethinkdb-vs-postgres.html. The author switched from ReThinkDB, a NoSQL, document-oriented database, to Postgres; Postgres comes off pretty good in the comparison. NoSQL databases are "supposed" to provide greater performance and efficiency in exchange for a more limited query language than SQL, and this isn't what happened.

Here's a blog suggesting Postgres as the "Swiss army knife" of databases: it can do everything. Maybe not as well as a niche product, but it can be a passable interim solution: renesd.blogspot.com/2017/02/is-postgresql-good-enough.html.

While we're at it: brentozar.com/archive/2013/02/7-things-developers-should-know-about-sql-server. We don't care about SQL Server (Microsoft's RDBMS), per se, but it's an interesting take on what DB administrators have to know, eventually. (And see the tail end of #2.)


Start with ER-to-relational mapping.

Then back to Nested Queries