This week in Software Engineering, we continued our discussion on SQL, starting with the various types of joins (cross, inner, natural, left, right) and continuing with subqueries, support for set operations, and data aggregation. One of the interesting things I learned was that SQL could be used to calculate statistics on data sets in addition to just returning subsets of data.

The second phase of the IDB project was also due this week. This phase was more involved since we had to implement a lot of the features we started in phase I, including the API, database, and dynamic pages. We encountered some difficulties in setting up the database, especially in getting the correct foreign keys for the associations between the data. After setting up the database and API, a lot of the remaining work was in converting our static HTML pages into React pages so that the data could be dynamically loaded. We ended up having some performance issues with loading data from our API since it takes a few seconds for all the data in a table to load. This was temporarily circumvented by having a loading image while the data is being fetched, but hopefully we can figure out a better solution to this problem in the final phase.

For the software tip of the week, Coursera is a great resource for finding free courses in computer science and other fields. In case you don’t get the courses you want for next semester, there should be an equivalent on the site.