Mark's IT Blog – Page 21

FIT9018: Week 10

Week 10’s lecture was a continuation from Week 9’s introduction to shell scripting. The tutorial this week was closely correlated to the lecture material for weeks 9 and 10.

Pearl of the Week: Test function in shell scripts. + /dev/null (trash bin for script outputs)

if [ $var1 = $var2 ]
then
echo var1 and var2 are the same
else
echo var1 and var2 are different
fi

We had a chance to make some scripts based on the constructs and operators that we learnt from the lecture:

[To be uploaded]

A basic but detailed guide to shell scripting: http://www.freeos.com/guides/lsst/

An advanced guide to shell scripting: http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

Database Technology

FIT9019: Week 10

Week 10 saw us move away from the more technical SQL and Indexing topics to ‘Database administration, Transaction management and Concurrency Control’.

Responsibilities of DBA:

Control of redundancy
- Use of standards for modelling
- Maintaining data dictionary
- Ensuring sufficient normalization
- Managing sharing of data between multiple applications
Control of Integrity Constraints
- Defining appropriate integrity constraints
- Ensuring applications meet with the impose constraints
- Ensuring applications cannot subvert constraints
Control of central data security
- Provision relevant user views
- Issuing passwords
- reviewing physical security
- design and monitoring of back up procedures

Also important duties are:

Query Optimization
Clusters, Indexes

Manoj then continued into the nature transactions, crashes and concurrency control. A quick summary below:

Transactions
- A single or number of processes involving database accesses that constitutes one single logical action (i.e. bank transfer). Atomic (indivisible, can’t separate processes), Durable (upon completion, stored permanently).
- Transactions can be committed or aborted (rollback, utilizing before-image log)
- Checkpoints are periodic (usually 15-20mins) batch writes of transactions to disk.
Soft Crashes
- I.e. Power failure, where system resets but no physical damage.
- After soft crash, secondary memory data is loaded, then transaction log is referred to and transaction missing from secondary memory are either:
  - Redone (REDO), if the transaction was completed and can be re-completed this will be done
  - Undone (UNDO) if the transaction was not completed (committed) in the log then it must be undone (transactions are atomic).

rollforward.rollback — source: week 10 lecture notes

Continue reading “FIT9019: Week 10”

Systems Analysis and Design

FIT9030: Week 10

Week 10 saw David get into the Object Oriented methodology for the Design Phase.
The key documents to come from the design phase (OO methodology) are:

Design Class Digrams

DomainDiagramVsDesignClassDiagram — source: week 10 lecture notes

Interaction (Sequence Diagram / Collaboration Diagram)

FirstCutSequenceDiagram — source: week 10 lecture notes

Continue reading “FIT9030: Week 10”

Foundations of Programming

FIT9017: Week 9

Program, Design testing a program. We had some overlap this week with the Systems Analysis and Design subject as we looked at some program design methodologies.

New topics covered were:

CRC (class, responsibilities collaborators)
Testing strategy evolved from testing classes in isolation to testing use cases and scenarios

The tutorial was focused on giving us an idea of how to design our classes for assignment 2. I think the plans that we discussed were to simplistic however and there should be more classes than we covered in the program. The text book seems to have no section on this topic and I have found the index to be terrible… D:<

I will cut this post short as I need to finish the class diagrams for stage 1 of assignment 2 due tomorrow. Finding it a bit difficult as cohesion and coupling seem to work against each other in some instances.

Computer Technologies and O/S

FIT9018: Week 9

Week 9 saw Andy delve further into utilizing the Unix shell followed by a tutorial on setting up the Apache HTTP server.

www.apache.org

On the unix shell, we explored shell scripts. The basics that we covered:

Pearl of the week – Common shell script errors:

[-z “$x”] error : no space near the [ ]’s
[ “$x”=”abc“ ] error : no space around =
y = 20 error : extra spaces around =

# -> comment character
x=y -> assign vaiable (no space)
shell keys words stored in .profile
Standard variables:
- $$ the process id of the shell
- $0 the name of the shell script (if applicable)
- $1…$9 $n refers to the nth command line argument
- $# contains the number of arguments
- $* a list of all the command line arguments
- $? Exit status (more on that shortly)
; -> End of line
if, then, else, for, for in, if-then-elif, while, until, break continue, case, trap.

Continue reading “FIT9018: Week 9”

Database Technology

FIT9019: Week 9

A very busy lecture this week with Manoj introducing some index structures including:

ISAM – Indexed Sequential Access Mechanism
Binary Tree – Suseptable to ‘lopsidedness’

binaryTreeTable — source week 9 lecture notes

B – Tree – Normalized but inconsistent lookup times.
B+ Tree – Normalized, all keys in leaf nodes. Used by Oracle.

bplusTreeTable — source: week 9 lecture slides

Systems Analysis and Design

FIT9030: Week 9

Quick review this week with a number of assignments still on the ‘to-do’ pile.

Week 9 -> Structured Design.

We jumped out of the Object Oriented development methodology to take a look at the Design phase in the eyes of a traditional Systems designer. What we saw:

System Flowchart – Need system boundaries in Design phase.

DesignDFD — source: week 9 lecture slides

Structure Chart – Describes processes in the System Flowchart in more detail using transaction analysis.

DesignStructureChart — source: week 9 lecture slides

Foundations of Programming

FIT9017: Week 8

Judy returned to present lecture 8 this week, focussing on Encapsulation and Scope. The coverage of each aspect was quite introductory so I am just going to list through the points covered very breifly.

Public Interface – public method and constructors are the objects/class’s interface
Encapsulation enables information hiding, a key point of object oriented development and code re-use
Local Variables – Scope limited to within a method
Field – attribute of an object, shoudl be private
Final – cannot be changed

Pearl of the Week:

Static vs Final – a good explination here

Short post this week, recently got Visual Studio 2010 so will look at trying out some C# in the next couple of weeks assuming I don’t get to addicted to SC2.

Computer Technologies and O/S

FIT9018: Week 8

Week 8’s lecture returned to the UNIX shell for some more in depth analysis. The tutorial was dedicated to Squid Proxy Server and how to run it from shell.

First off, the lecture on Shell Scripting:

shellprocess — What happens when you type a command in shell

Continue reading “FIT9018: Week 8”

Database Technology

FIT9019 – Week 8

Was quite a hectic week for Database Technologies with the movement of lecture and tutorials and the major assignment due. Thank to Manoj for putting in so much consultation time for everyone outside of class hours. Unfortunately I could not make the lecture due to work commitments but I will review the lecture notes with some assistance from the text book.

Physical Database Design 1:

The process of developing a physical implementation strategy for a logical design: