Databases with Joel Larson

We were lucky enough to get a visit from Joel Larson a teacher at the University of Washington who knows a great deal about databases. Now I didn't know anything about databases before this presentation, like I didn't know anything at all. All i knew is database was a word, and it had something to do with computers. So as you can tell, I learned a lot from Joel. First of a database stores data. Thats its job. The coolest fact I learned was a database that stored data for a database is called a metadatabase. There is pretty much three different types of data, unstructured, semi-structured and structured data. Databases store data for structured data. I'm really not interested in knowing how the other two types of data are stored.  And yes I am saying data a lot. Basically if there is information on anything, theres gonna be a database. I especially loved learning about the Information Wars in the 1960s, mainly because i'm a big history nerd. The Information Wars was when manufacturers and grocery stores started competing over how many products they needed. With the bar code, and a database to store this information grocery stores where finally able to figure out how much product they actually needed, and could tell that to the manufacturer. I thought that was a pretty neat fact, and its all thanks to the incredibly complex database.