Databases

Although databases were covered in today's lecture and not last week's, I'm going to blog about them today because of their importance to websites like Charities Connect. The reasons most websites use databases are that they help companies manage vast amount of information, perform quick queries, and make fast decisions without about information. For Charities Connect's website, we have to store and organize information about charities, events, sponsors, companies, and how those things relate to each other. There is no way Charities Connect could handle organizing and presenting all of the information that will be on its website without a database.
In a pre-database world, companies would have to use physical filing cabinets to store and organize information. Soon, this would evolve to storing information on word documents, and eventually on excel. But, none of these methods can hold a candle to what a database is capable of doing. A database is basically a set of tables. Every one of these tables consists of an attribute. In the case of Charities Connect, such attributes would include: the charity name, the cause, the founders and their information, etc. We would also need to organize events into attributes (location, time, type, food, etc.). Obviously, there's a lot of information that needs to be sorted. Each table will be given a primary key, which is a unique attribute of each table.
The great thing about databases are that they can form relationships between data. For example, I could go into the database and connect a charity, to an event, to whatever company is sponsoring it. The database would synchronize that data accordingly. The foreign key is that part of the database forms those relationships. If I use the Relational Database Management System, my database will also include features like security management, backup and recovery management, and multi-user management.
Database data management is not only important for internal organization of data, but is also used to make the Charities Connect website user-friendly. Without the organization of data into different categories, the website itself wouldn't be organized, and therefore hard to use. Usability is key when designing a  social media website. When someone managing a charity logs on the Charities Connect, I want them to see what other charities are doing, what companies are looking for charities to sponsor, what people are saying about their charities, and more. This all needs to be within the users reach, and this information needs to be easy to access.