DEV Community: Yoon Ho Jung

Database Normalization

Yoon Ho Jung — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 23:16:32 +0000

Now that we have an actual set of tables formulated, there is a need to be sure that the data in the tables are not scrambled. So for this week, I will be 'normalizing' my data.

Normalization is a technique for organizing data in a database.The organization of data is managed with the form of stages of organization are called normal forms. These are the forms applied in a database.

First Normal Form (1NF):

Data is stored in tables with rows uniquely identified by a primary key
Data within each table is stored in individual columns in its most reduced form
No repeating groups

Second Normal Form (2NF):

Everything from 1NF
Only data that relates to a table’s primary key is stored in each table

Third Normal Form (3NF):

Everything from 2NF

Here's the alteration of one of my tables via normalization:
Before

After

As you can see, the column of 'Cities' was removed due to latent redundancy (zipcode can be used to find city name anyways).

Before

After

Dilemma over safety and privacy

Yoon Ho Jung — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 03:58:08 +0000

Recently, TechCrunch released an article detailing the usage of a mandatory, location-tracking application for students of Albion College in Michigan. Aura is an app developed with the aim to automatically alert school officials when a student was resulted in positive for COVID-19 and alerts other students if they had come into close contact with said individual. However, for this functionality to work, it tracks student's locations around the clock.

This, in itself, would cause concern unfortunately. Furthermore, there were also at least 2 security risks within the app. As a result, some students on campus felt reluctant to return, as this privacy-invading application was mandatory for all students. In fact, when Korea’s way of counteracting against the pandemic via GPS tracking was known to the world, majority of the countries showed concerns about the very problem: privacy invasion.

However in time of crisis like now, people need to let down something for the sake of humanity and thus I’d be compliant to this. For one, thanks to the tracking system and the citizens cooperation with KDCP(Korea Disease Control and Prevention), Korea managed to mitigate the pandemic and keep the country under control.

Privacy Concern

While I do say that, I do understand the risks of using Aura. For one, the app is intrusive, ... only intrusive. Full time GPS tracking in the past was only required for house arrest. I'm sure there is someone around us who would be absolutely intolerant about this.
Frankly, this wouldn't be too much of a serious problem if the programming of the app is flexible and manageable. However, the real issue that I see from reading the article is that the management of Aura aren't as responsive as others would desire.

Diagrams

We have updated COVID Risk diagrams! We even have a physical diagram now.

Conceptual

Physical

Visualizing COVID Risk via ER Diagram

Yoon Ho Jung — Mon, 07 Sep 2020 03:49:31 +0000

Hello!

As you guys would've probably heard in the past few months, times we are living in are quite uneasy. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on people all over the world, forcing many college students including myself to do their education virtually while also putting many people out of work or under that risk if not, and causing the death of almost 900K people around the world.

There are many risks and factors that play into the likelihood of an individual person or patient contacting the COVID-19, as well as the probability of recovery from the illness. In order to have ourselves be assured about the situation of the pandemic, I created a Diagram that displays many of the entities, relationships and attributes that can help understand the risk factors for COVID-19.

Entities

The entities I chose are patient info, test (results & qualities), traits, hospital, and risk.

Patient info

Patient describes the user and has the primary key of User ID. Primary keys are unique fields that identify each tuple of an entity. The said keys include geographic location, age, sex, and occupation. Sex and age are the typical categories you would expect in a medical statistics; but occupation and geographic location serve the more integral points. Notably, Korea’s method of tracking system is what can emphasize the importance of the patients’ occupation and geographic location. Occupations and places they live can help indicate any additional latent infectants.

Test

To be precise about test, I mean the quality of the COVID testing and the results. Quality is all about the accuracy of indicating the infection and result speed is set to indicate the amount of time to find the result, which is something that the medical institutions seek to minimize. Results is simply whether the test patient is negative or positive.

Traits

Behavior describes how a patient behaves in their everyday life. Its primary key is also User ID because behavior will be unique to each user. It also contains a foreign key for occupation to reflect the relationship between occupation and behavior. Its relationship with patient is maintained through the shared primary key.

Risk

Risk describes a patient's risk from Covid-19. It’s also a separate factor because it is unique to each user and is based on all of the other information.

Hospital

Hospital describes the characteristics of a hospital within a location. The foreign key for Location is used to form this link. Hospital has the primary key of name because hospital names tend to be very location specific; needless to say that each hospital is also unique with different number of beds and medical staffs so it is an important factor to put in the tuple.

Beginning of My IT

Yoon Ho Jung — Mon, 31 Aug 2020 01:07:53 +0000

Who am I

My name is Yoon Ho Jung. I am a Junior at Penn State, currently majoring in Information Science. This is something I hope to continue after school, and maybe even make a career out of it. This post marks one of my first steps into the professional world. In the future, I plan to use this site to carve in my journey in the professional world. I hope you stick around as well.

My path of IT

I wouldn't call myself an IT professional at all as of how I am right now, but as an enthusiast of it. I've started getting into the My interests in technology were initially from video games and streaming then progressed through my in-class experiences throughout high school. During the summer break, I took a java programming class and learned that programming was something that I could do. I also studied R language before so I feel like I'm comfortable with programming-based path.
While I wouldn’t say that I have a specific path of what I want to do in terms of IT in the future, I know for sure that I want my career to be related to tech in whichever way like web development.

App development

If I were to pick an immediate field of interest, then it would be app development. Applications that can manage trivial tasks for people or keep them organized have great potential to provide a big return for a relatively small investment, and it's very satisfying to make things that are immediately useful like that, which is something that I would definitely like to try.

Alongside this blog, I will also be uploading videos onto my YouTube channel as I am learning of the skills in IT and sharing my progression from a student to a professional in this field. For my first video, I'll be talking about the differences between SQL and NoSQL.

IST 210 Lab 1

As this blog is for a class, here is a linked Youtube video on the rest of the assignment. Apology in advance with the obnoxious voice quality in the video. I'm planning on getting a new speaker ASAP.

Short Summary of SQL vs NoSQL:

What is it?
SQL: Structured Query Language lets you access and manipulate databases. Effective for inserting, searching, updating, and deleting database records.
NoSQL: have dynamic schemas for unstructured data, and data is stored in many ways; meaning that you can create documents without having to first define their structure and thus each document can have its own unique structure
What is the difference?
SQL: deals with Relational Databases, databases are table based
NoSQL: data can be stored in many ways: column-oriented, document-oriented, graph-based, etc.

Final notes

Thanks for reading my blog. For a first time, I hope it didn't seem too bad for u guys. I am still not completely comfortable with conveying my ideas through video, but as time passes and my experience grows, I aspire to improve these social skills. I welcome any feedback that may help me improve my skills and understandings for this course.