This week, I had to learn about the remaining caching policies and how they could be used for a cloud-hosted database connection. I read about three policies and chose the Least Frequently Used (LRU) policy to be implemented in future work. On top of this, I finished my paper and prepared my short presentation for the poster symposium. This is the last week I'm here in College Station doing undergraduate research and I'm really going to miss it.
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As the research comes to an end, everything is speeding up. With a poster and paper due soon, so is the stress that comes along with. I've finished up the code for insertions and queries of data for a local MongoDB database. I began thinking I was getting the right numbers for the time taken to insert and query the random data I created, but that turns out not to be the case. Luckily it was simple again, and it was the wrong placement of certain lines of code. With correct data, I am able to work on my poster for the presentation on August 7th and begin practicing for my elevator speech.
This week began like usual, I had a problem but by the end of the week I luckily ended up solving it. This problem involved finding specific entries in the MongoDB database, matching specific fields with and entered value, and querying them. In theory it shouldn't be difficult, but the MongoDB java-driver language is interesting to learn. I initially thought it was just me, but while researching about the language, I watched a small video and the presenter said that he was surprised that anyone even used MongoDB with java because of how verbose it is. It eased me to hear that, and has actually helped me thus far.
As the deadline for the research project approaches, I'm continuing to learn more about how MongoDB works in the Eclipse environment, and I've learned that it can be very verbose and extremely finicky. Nevertheless, I've continued to develop my program in order to test it in the upcoming week. Until then, I will keep tweaking my program and adding to specifics to it.
This week has been much less frustrating. I had another researcher take a look at the code I was struggling with, and it worked just fine on his computer. I took another look at it and it was a very simple mistake in searching for the data within the database that was not working. So I continued working on my code (I'm adding a querying aspect to it) and continued to learn more about MongoDB.
I began and ended this week in a grid lock. I could not figure out how to get my program to work and connect with the MongoDB cloud database. I ran multiple test applications to test the connection between the application and the cloud. All of the test applications worked just fine, but when it came to the actual application I was working on, the connection would work but the data would never actually be inserted into the database. It's been frustrating, and since MongoDB recently updated their java driver, the online resources are lacking. Sigh. I guess its a good thing I like puzzles right?
At the beginning of this week, I began having trouble with entering user input into the local Mongo database. I wasn't able to finish it until the end of the week because I began working with high school students in a STEM summer camp called ENGAGE. The undergraduate research students helped the camp students working with MIT App Inventor to create apps that would be presented and judged at the end of the week. Helping with the students was a great experience for me. I learned more about MIT App Inventor and more about what makes the younger generation inspired. It was a great experience to say the least!
This week I began learning more in depth about MongoDB. After another meeting with Dr. Da Silva, we decided on a research project which will involve both cloud and local databases on mobile devices. The project is to create an app that links to the Mongo database and another app that links to it's local database. After the connections have been established, measurements will be taken to discover which one is more efficient, if a combination of the two is more efficient, etc.
This week began as another slow week. I still played around with the MIT App Inventor for the first few days. After another meeting with Dr. Da Silva, we discussed different research projects with one, which is very interesting to me, in research involving domestic animal patterns and seeing if we could identify problems associated with this. Until further discussion I will be doing research on databases, specifically MongoDB. Databases are foreign territory to me as I have never had a class on Data Structures... so this will be an interesting learning experience! Nevertheless, I've began learning about the basics of databases and SQLs to get a feel of how mongoDB will be.
The first week at Texas A&M was similar to a new student orientation. We took a tour of the extensive campus, met research students involved in other programs, and discussed what will be expected of us in the near future. Towards the end of the week, Dr. Da Silva and I discussed possible research ideas that I could work on. One we are leaning towards, is creating a database. Aside from that, I played around with MIT App Inventor which will be used for a high school summer camp in the upcoming weeks.
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