Journal 20

 June 4 - June 10

I have learned many things this week, and have had many ups and downs with my work. For one, I learned how to reset a password on MySQL. It was an absolute pain to figure out and took me nearly two hours to do so. Thank you MySQL for making password recovery and reset such a pain (lol). Seeing that programs must establish a connection to a database before being able to execute any queries, this was a huge issue when starting my work for the week. As an actual answer though, I learned how to do SQL within an application program such as IntelliJ. I find it is much more difficult to program the executable statements and retrieve result sets within Java, as MySQL seems so straightforward and intuitive when creating statements. Also, there are instances that are trickier to handle in other programs when working with SQL: such as when reading null values, handling database generated keys, and creating transaction methods. Another interesting thing I learned about in the text this week was the capabilities of high level database APIs. Oftentimes when I am reading in various classes, I wonder when or how I will use this knowledge in the future, and this portion of the reading helped me to answer that question. In my notes, I included that, at a high level, database API capabilities range from: managing connections, preparing queries, executing queries with both single and multiple-row results, and calling stored procedures. A key portion from the text that I saved to my notes and starred for future reference is the way Java connects to the MySQL database through the import of Connection and DriverManager classes. I made sure to take note of the use of a try block to ensure the login credentials work or that there is a database at all. Furthermore, I starred the connection.close() portion to remember to implement that at the end of my programs in order to release the connection. My notes were of great help when completing Lab 17, as I had a lot of the necessary code written down already. I cannot believe this class is almost over, but I can definitely feel that end-of-eight-weeks fatigue. Luckily, I have teammates who are very fun to work with, and I am enjoying working on our group projects together despite the burnout.