SQL or Structured Query Language is a database language used to create and maintain databases in various applications. It works by storing the data in tables, columns, rows, etc. It comes with three basic commands: Select- This command fetches all the information from a table Insert- This command inserts new records into a table Update- This command updates the existing records in a table. It also comes with four optional clauses, which are used for data validation and making the query unique:

SQL is language-independent, meaning- it works on any database or platform. However, some database has their SQL dialects that were made to give more power and flexibility to deal with the specific database. For example, MySQL has a MySQL-specific SQL dialect.

Basics Of SQL

SQL is based on four essential elements: table, column, row, and value. Like any other database language, such as Oracle or MySQL; however, it has fewer commands to do the operations but more flexibility and power than those languages. In today’s time, people have used complex databases such as Oracle or MS SQL. However, it is essential to know the basics of SQL even if you will not use it.

SQL is divided into two major categories:

The first category is DML (Data Manipulation Language) used to perform the data operations on any database. The four basic commands in this category are Select, Insert, Update and Delete.

The second category is DDL (Data Definition Language), used to create or change the structure of tables in a database. It comprises only two basic commands: Create Table and Drop Tables.

However, you will rarely use this as the regular users who use SQL are told not to mess with the databases and tables as it may cause data loss.

Three dots connect these commands and tables, called Joins. This is used to select and fetch only the required information from a table based on the conditions specified in control.

It also involves identifying the columns that will be displayed and their order, and having an option to determine which rows need to be displayed.

How to create Your first SQL Database

In this article, we will talk about the basics of SQL tables and how to create them. For an average user that has no experience in databases or programming languages, here are a few steps to get started with your first database:

Step 1: Get yourself an MS SQL Server if you will use Microsoft technologies, MySQL if you are going to use Java, and so on.

Step 2: Open your favorite editor or IDE like Notepad++

Tip: Always begin and end your code with a blank line.

Step 3: Create the table

Coding is divided into two categories, comments and commands. Here we will use words to describe what we are doing and then execute the order into an SQL language compiler or interpreter.

Step 4: Let us see the actual code for creating a table with some sample data in it.

After writing your code, save and compile it and then run this command in your SQL Server management studio or MySQL client. It must show up something like this:

Now you have successfully created the first database.

Creating perfect SQL Database

The perfect SQL database has a magnificent structure and gives detailed information about the data stored in it. Though it may seem like a straightforward task to create an SQL database, if you are using new tools or technology, you would want to do things according to the best practices and avoid leaving errors that could affect your project.

Here, we will discuss the best practices that can be followed when creating your first database.

Step 1:

Before coding or design any database, it is essential to think over the process and system you will create. So it would help if you had done all your preliminary work before starting with coding/designing your database.

Step 2:

Choose the best-suited tools for your database. With Microsoft SQL Server, go for T-SQL language and PHP or ASP.NET with MySQL. Also, select proper names for your tables or columns to avoid any misspeak, which may lead to errors while testing or executing the newly created database. After creating databases, try it to see if there are any bugs or mistakes.

Step 3:

The next thing that you could follow is to create primary and foreign keys for your database. This will avoid conflicts when the same data is entered into two different tables.

Ensure that your primary and tables are by different uses, leading to a severe error in your system.

A table can have several foreign keys, but only one can be the primary key. It is an attribute that uniquely identifies a row in a table. Key points to remember while creating keys for your database are:

1) The primary key should comprise only one attribute; if there are more attributes, each should have unique values, and you can create indexes based on those columns.

2) All the table columns must be included in the primary key, and you may not create a composite or artificial key.

3) You can use only one attribute as a primary key. For example, ‘ID,’ an integer, would be wrong while assigning ID for every post published on your blog. It contains data of authors, categories, publishes dates and other information.

Step 4:

In this step, you need to create foreign keys, which are nothing but the attributes of a particular table that points to another table’s primary key. While creating foreign keys, make sure you use one-to-many (1:M) relationships. For example, in your new blog system. You need to create foreign keys for the following columns:

• CategoryID—primary key of category database table <—One (1) Foreign Key

posted—primary key of post database table <—Many (M) Foreign Keys

So it means that there should be a single column on the left side of the foreign key and multiple columns on the right.

Step 5:

Apart from creating tables and keys for them, you also need to decide how your database will be developed further. You should think about future needs for your site (for the next 6-12 months) so that you can plan accordingly.

Wrapping Up

If you want to create the best SQL database, you were then following all the steps mentioned above and ensuring no errors in your database.

In MySQL, you should have checked your code for any syntax and logical errors, so how can we forget about checking T-SQL statements on the Microsoft side. So, it is crucial to know the basic rules of SQL before coding/designing a database.

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I know some of you may think this is unfair therefore I will explain my reasoning as to why the money should go towards universities not that athletes themselves my first point I’d like to talk about regarding paying college athletes is a some athletes are already offered full ride scholarships fluoride is essentially when your room tuition board and dining expenses are covered according to information taken by a survey from scholarships dot-com Division one schools that participate in football can give out up to 85 scholarships to their players with the average amount of money awarded to thirty six thousand and seventy dollars. Essentially they have around 100 120 players and eighty-five of them can accept this scholarship which is considered a full ride and $36,000 is set towards school and also for them to have just in case. 

Whether it’s getting extra books or getting a tutor if that costs money then they would use that money towards that but it’s already more than enough left over for certain schools tuition as I mentioned earlier how aha Ohio State has ten thousand dollars in state tuition let’s say you’re a player that comes from Ohio you get a full ride scholarship you pay the $10,000 you still have twenty six thousand dollars left over spent. What exactly are you going to spend it on also my next point would be that certain players have already been penalized for receiving funds or doing stuff to inherit funds from other people for example the UNC target or University of North Carolina Tar Heel football program they had five players that were kicked off the team due to the fact that they were saving money there was also one case where a man named Terry Watson gave $2,000 to one student named Marvin Austin who was also on the team and he was eventually dismissed from the team. 

My question is how would you give back or if you should give back to those players that have already been affected and how it’d be a fan of their players who have lost accolades such as records, stats trophies rings they lost those because of the fact that they either received money or gave money. Do they get their money back or do they get their accolades back or they just left in the dust even though the rule wasn’t implemented back then um yes players need to maybe coming to schools for sports but one thing that, I would like to focus on is the fact that you come to school for an education first and that’s like the bottom line like for example my coach tells me focus on school go to class get your work done and then focus on practice after. I feel that whatever you’re an athlete, whenever you’re going to school somewhere big, yes you may have that exposure and yes you may be traveling.

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Try to automate as many things as possible

Automation is perfect when you need to improve both productivity and workflow. The more automated processes are, the more time you have to make sure that there aren’t any bugs. You can learn how to automate repetitive tests to have more time on issues that are burning.

Make someone in charge of the QA process

If you can’t hire more QA specialists, it would be smart to organize a team responsible for this process, as well as make somebody in charge of that team. This way, you will have strategy, a variety of approaches, as well as a better understanding of what needs to be done in order to improve the QA process. If somebody within the team is responsible for QA solely, quality standards will improve. What is more, you can always ask that person what tasks have been prioritized, as well as when you can expect to get it done. Having a QA manager presupposes that there will be someone experienced to guide the team, manage test data, and hold meetings.

Get QA integrated at earlier stages

Typically, QA issues are discussed at a later stage before the release of the product/service. However, it is actually smart to start thinking about the QA process easier. This way, it will be easier for programmers to write code and to choose a more appropriate programming language. What is more, it gives you more chances of releasing on time. Taking into account the amount of time the team will spend on testing and bug tracking, the earlier you start, the less stressed you will feel before release time. You will know for sure that you have allocated enough time on every single development process which is why the product/service you are about to release will have better reviews.

Try to predict possible regression

If you want to have a shorter release cycle, regression testing is vital. This way, you will know how to manage it before it’s time to release. When new features are added, don’t forget to run regression tests to spot any bugs. It will help you stay on top of things and avoid missing some fundamental changes that might undo all the great work you’ve been doing so far. Apart from that, you will not have to run full tests every single time if you manage to figure out how many software modules can potentially experience regression.

Make use of the QAOps framework

If you are not familiar with the term, QAOps stands for Quality Assurance (QA) and software operations (Ops). This framework helps to develop three most significant feedback loops when you are moving quickly towards the release of your product/service. These feedback loops include optimizing, blending and growing in order to enable growth, stability and structure.

In other words, this framework helps you figure out how to deliver software at the right speed and at the right scale. Furthermore, having used this framework it will be easier for you to make profit from your product or service, especially if you manage to implement it organization-wide. This trick will be particularly helpful to all those employees working on a large product with a big team of QA engineers, as well as when the expectations of stakeholders are high. The stricter the deadlines, the more tools you need to make it all work. Make sure that you have everything you need to take on such complex tasks, as well as be able to release products within the specified deadlines. Automating the majority of routine processes helps to reach this goal faster. In addition, you won’t feel bored doing the same thing over and over again.

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The popularization of blockchain and the rapid development of blockchain technologies lead to a permanent shortage of qualified blockchain developers to create new solutions. According to Upwork experts, the demand for blockchain specialists has grown significantly in recent years.

Created as the driving force behind the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, blockchain has managed to prove its usefulness in other directions as well. Distributed ledger technology can help automate administrative procedures involving the state, which require legal entries to be made in a number of registers and registers related to property rights, civil status, proof of legal capacity, and health status.

In addition to the national level, the municipal and regional ones have potential:

creation of portals for public participation of citizens in the affairs of the city - region - country;
development of a unified register that stores information about the history of placing municipal orders;
using a mechanism for transparency in the distribution of benefits and subsidies, places in children's camps, etc.

The blockchain approach is promising in the field of voting and elections. Among the developments:

The Greek experience of the introduction of the electronic voting system E2E - it allows the voter to check the time and the fact of casting his vote for a specific candidate.
Conducting intraparty voting in Texas (via Blockchain Technologies Corp).
The Australians from NVB are promoting blockchain voting software as a "political application": a citizen can vote on any political issue so that politicians can get the opinion of voters and listen to it.
An Indonesian hacker organization, Protect the Voice, was founded to publicize election results, exposing an abundance of fraud. Citizens were given the option of checking and confirming the results from all polling stations.
"Voting" on the blockchain to solve current commercial problems: for example, by shareholders (NASDAQ stock exchange), as well as testing the e-proxy voting system for bondholders (RF).
Prevention of threats and hacker attacks: blockchain makes it possible to strengthen cybersecurity due to the lack of a single point of failure, immutability of the ledger.

For an experienced programmer with skills in C ++, JavaScript, HTML and CSS, it will not be so difficult to understand the intricacies of working with the blockchain. And the abundance of tasks and staff shortage, which we talked about above, will allow him to forget about periods of financial instability and the absence of serious projects.

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English from Intermediate, any QA courses, practice in an IT company. Done, you are amazing.
What it takes to become a good QA engineer

To begin with, you should understand if this is yours. I would single out a few basic characteristics of work and character traits to do testing.
Technical erudition

“Technical savvy”, as they sometimes write in vacancies, and a desire to understand technology. You should be interested in how what works, how what works inside. This understanding will serve you well in the future and usually goes hand in hand with the curiosity a good tester needs.

Have you ever installed and configured Linux – for yourself, purely out of interest? Trying to figure out how blockchain works? Did you make your friends a WordPress site? If not, give it a try and watch your reaction. Is it interesting if the difficulties spur on to find a solution, rummage in Google and on the forums? When the end result is not the same, is there a desire to get to the bottom and make everything start working as it should? If your answer is yes, then testing is probably right for you.

So, the first is about thoughtless perfectionism, the second is about always keeping in mind the image of the user, understanding what tasks he will solve, in what conditions, where it will be convenient for him, and where not, what non-standard methods he can use solve their problems, how our application will integrate into the overall ecosystem and routine of the user.

In vacancies, they often write “focus on details, perfectionism.” They are needed, but only if they are properly focused.
Ability to think and write in a structured way

Conduct a thought experiment: Imagine describing how to test a car’s central locking system. You will start to write, for example, “open, close”, but there are different states: “open already open”, “close already closed”, or different points of influence: you can open it with a keychain, key, buttons from the inside. Do you need to test the alarm? And the auto-locking of the doors at speed? In testing, there are a number of techniques and techniques that help to correctly break tests into groups, build the correct hierarchy, check the sufficiency of test scenarios, but even with them, it is important to be able to think structurally.
Ability to work with large amounts of data and learn quickly

In your work, you will most likely need the skill to work with large and poorly structured amounts of information (also known as “specification”, “technical task”, “corporate knowledge base”), quickly understand how a complex (and not always logically written) system works, and quickly get basic knowledge in completely different areas. If your project is about financial portfolio management, you will have to understand finance, if about warehouse management – in logistics, etc. A good way to test yourself is to take and successfully complete some course on coursera.com on an unfamiliar and fundamental subject, preferably at English.

Do you need to be able to do everything at once?

So, to become a good QA engineer, you need to have an active penchant for technology, be able to take the user’s side, structure information and write good documents, and you also need to be a master of negotiations.

It can be argued here that I am clearly not describing the starting position. This is true, but the market is such that starting positions in QA are often required to grow. There is a widespread belief that QA is such an easy way to start working in IT, knowing nothing and not being able to. The QA community rejects this idea and may be outright offended for voicing it (see the first two myths here), but there is a nuance.

In junior positions (intern – June, first year of work), testing is a job that is really likely to be difficult, but does not require a large amount of special skills or knowledge. But further it becomes more difficult, get ready to learn a lot.

Most companies are looking for people who can move to this next level and will try to weed out people who are interested in “just being in IT”. Either they will check the motivation to grow further in the context of QA, or the knowledge required to move to the next position. Therefore, it makes sense to study for growth.

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And if we want to analyze data, we need to get it from somewhere, and we get it, as a rule, from databases. This is not always visible with the naked eye, but whether we read the news, transfer money from one account to another, request account statements, make purchases in an online store, or simply get acquainted with the prices of competitors – we do all this by referring to various databases.

Different levels and roles working with SQL or the results of its use

And before we get the usual “readable” representation of the information we need, the data is retrieved from the repositories. And most often this happens precisely with the use of SQL. In a broad sense, SQL is not a programming language, although there is such an established misconception. In fact, it looks more like the most common English speech.
Who are data analysts and what do they work with?

Data analysts are experimenters who own the tools to connect data streams from different sources, and also hypothesize and test them. This is where they need databases and a language that allows them to accurately formulate a query to them. Correct acquisition of the initial data is an art that guarantees a high probability that cause-and-effect relationships will be established in the behavior of the objects under study. It is the quality of the data that allows you to choose the most suitable hypotheses.

In addition to SQL, data analysts need to know tools for statistical data analysis: these are highly specialized packages – SPSS, Statistika, and various programming languages ​​- SAS, R, Python, which have functionality for data analysis and visualization, and very lightweight solutions like Gretl. And the most popular set of tools among analysts is, perhaps, Python + SQL.

Tools and Techniques Facing the Data Analyst

Often it is necessary to present the data in a visual and understandable way for the business, and sometimes it is necessary to evaluate for yourself which factors influencing the data are significant and which are not, which reasons for deviations are codependent. When it is necessary to make forecasts, analysts, instead of working directly with databases, work with datasets (data tables) using various batch solutions.

Backend developer (Kotlin)

At the same time, each industry has its own analysis standards, depending on the sensitivity of the data: for a government structure, the set of tools will be one (based on strict access restrictions), for non-profit organizations – another, for a digital startup – the third.
Where to get the data and what to do with SQL commands?

Organizations have their own data stores and can be accessed when needed. This happens both when differentiating user rights, and when working on the development of databases. Using Python, knowing the server address and the data for connecting to it, you can import the necessary libraries and write requests already inside the used program.
Examples of libraries: for ODBC – pyodbc, PostgreSQL – psycopg2, MySQL – mysql.connector, etc.

Your “recipient” program, in turn, can reside inside a cloud solution based on jupiter notebook. And you will apply further calculations to the obtained data and / or plot graphs (at least libraries: pandas, numpy, matplotlib, etc.).

Analytical functions

It is believed that in databases, each line of the query should be processed independently of the others. Practice dictates other tasks to us, in which it is often necessary to group rows and calculate common indicators for them that are used to assess the characteristics of rows within a group.

Examples:

calculate the frequency of communication of friends with each other (for example, it is necessary to determine the closest contacts within the selected circles): then we will look for the percentage ratios of the duration of negotiations, the frequency of correspondence and telephone conversations, the number of geographical intersections, visits to shared resources, etc.,
compare salaries of employees within departments, calculate ratings,
find out the top N customers in terms of services or products,
find out the workload of neighboring points of sale, etc.

SQL analytical functions come to the rescue – a powerful tool that helps unload the client from a large amount of procedural code, DBMS – from complex and sometimes ineffective queries, reduce development time and at the same time get the desired result.

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In order to ensure the operability of microservices, to simplify their management, and most importantly, to isolate them from each other, they are “packed” into containers. A container is a shell that contains everything you need to successfully launch and operate a specific microservice. Several different containers can run under the same operating system, but each of them works with its own software libraries and dependencies. Failure of one container does not have any consequences for others, and it can be restarted almost instantly on another server in the cluster.

To optimize and automate the container management process, special software is used – an orchestrator.

World practice shows that when developing web applications today it is advisable to use a cloud-native approach using complex products for working with containers. Therefore, right now you need to think about how your company develops, implements and maintains all business systems. Today, Kubernetes has become almost the industry standard for launching containerized microservices – other players occupy only certain narrow niches, their percentage is very small.

A Kubernetes-based solution has become extremely popular over the past few years due to its wide customization capabilities. In addition, Kubernetes can be configured and run on almost any hardware platform: bare-metal, virtual machines, and in the cloud.
Where do legs grow from?

The word kubernetes in ancient Greek was used to describe the person who controls the ship. Through a graceful allegory, the essence of the technology “driving” containers is revealed. In 2006, long before Kubernetes existed, two Google engineers began work on the Control groups (cgroups) project. The solution emerged from the functionality of the Linux kernel itself, which makes it possible to isolate RAM, CPU, networking and disk I / O resources into a collection of processes.

The next step was to release Google’s own open source system called lmctfy (Let Me Contain That For You – let me contain this for you). The tool was supposed to be an alternative to LXC (Linux Containers) for working with application containers on Google servers. At that time, lmctfy, LXC and Docker were all in the same position in the market. To avoid this kind of overlap, Google halted all development of lmctfy in 2015. In the same year, the search giant published “Large-Scale Cluster Management at Google with Borg.” The code of the Borg internal project was made publicly available, further development led to widespread popularity – the project received the external name Kubernetes and since then has managed to become the de facto industry standard in container management based on Docker.

It is also worth noting that Docker has not remained the only possible tool for containerizing applications. In 2016, The Linux Foundation, together with major industry players, launched the Open Container Project (now known as the Open Container Initiative) for open standards for the container runtime. The project pursued the goal of uniting the competing Docker and CoreOS into a single standard. At the same time, Red Hat began building its own container launch solution, publishing it online as the Open Container Initiative Daemon (OCID). Even then, the project set itself the task of “implementing a standard runtime interface for containers in Kubernetes”, later called CRI-O – Container Runtime Interface. Kubernetes today supports both technologies. Developers have only benefited from this, having received a variety of free products and competition between containerized application runtimes.

Kubernetes is certainly not the only system with such capabilities, but it is this product that remains the leader today thanks to the wide support of the Open Source developer community. In addition, many vendors use Kubernetes to build proprietary systems based on it.

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Internal hackathons are also not lagging behind and replace the old, very costly and not always justifiable team building. Double benefit: colleagues not only made friends and met in an informal setting, but also solved a problem that their hands could never reach in their daily work routine.

Moreover, some organizers try to make the hackathons themselves unusual: they make them thematic, place the participants in unusual locations or conditions, expand the geography or limit the technologies used. At the very least, this makes the hackathons stand out from the crowd of others and draws attention to them, and as a maximum, it puts the participants in even more stressful, even extreme situations, which encourages them to give their best. We will tell you about the hackathons that surprised us the most.
Train hackathon

Last year Belarus and Latvia organized a joint hackathon: it started in Minsk and took place on the Minsk-Riga train. The idea, according to the organizers, was to explore and bring together the startup and business ecosystems of the two countries.

Especially for the hackathon, an additional carriage was attached to the train, in which the participants and mentors were traveling. And in Riga on the platform they were met by the Minister of Economy of Latvia. The participants attended master classes and mentoring sessions, learned how to create a business model, identify demand and find investors.

We visited the innovation cluster of the Riga University of Technology, People Work coworking spaces and Swedbank. By the way, this is not the first hackathon of this kind: a group of British railway companies and the UK Department of Transport organized a Hacktrain in 2015. One hundred and fifty people – developers, engineers, designers and entrepreneurs – took part in the train hackathon to improve the UK rail system. The train went from London to York, the competition lasted 48 hours. The prize fund was £ 25,000, and the best ideas were given the chance to present their projects to ministers and senior management of railway companies.
Airplane hackathon

Another unusual hackathon took place during the flight from Hong Kong to London. The organizers of the Hack Horizon event set out to improve the overall travel experience by creating new customer service solutions. Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA), Heathrow Airport, Travelport, Skyscanner, MTR and Regal Hotels have teamed up to deliver this extraordinary flight and expand the legacy of the travel business. A total of 32 developers, designers and entrepreneurs have been selected from nearly 700 applicants from around the world.

Depending on their skill set, the participants were divided into teams of 3 to 5 people and were asked to create an innovative solution for hotels and airports right on board a British Airways aircraft. The guys had the best technologies of the travel industry and the API of the necessary services at their disposal. They also had the opportunity to receive advice and support from invited mentors and experts. As a result, in 72 hours, the participants created 8 prototypes of solutions to painful problems that arise during the trip.

Among the ideas were: a blockchain-based secure baggage transfer system, a smartwatch built using deep learning that personalizes the passenger experience at the airport, a digital service for parents organizing long-term stays of their children abroad. Hack Horizon immersed the hackathon participants on a real journey and gave them the opportunity to receive quick feedback from travelers so that they can focus on real travel weaknesses.
Beer hackathon

In April 2018, the Beerhack beer hackathon took place in Zurich and Rheinfelden. One of the main partners and organizers was the largest Swiss brewing company Feldschlösschen. The assignments were aimed at solving issues of transportation, packaging and technological process during the production of beer. A total of 66 people took part in the competition.

And the three winners received prizes: 3,000 Swiss francs each and a chance to take a three-month course on implementing their startup from another organizer, Swiss Startup Factory Accelerator. Interesting fact: during the event, 400 beers were drunk.

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For a long time, I’ve been writing JavaScript code without fully understanding how it works under the hood. Basically, in order to code in JavaScript, you don’t need to know how it works from the inside, but it will make your code better and allow you to look at some things in the language from a different angle.

All JavaScript code is executed in a single thread, which means that only one thing can be processed at a time. On the one hand, this is a useful limitation, since it allows us not to think about the specifics of working with parallelism. On the other hand, we must constantly monitor the code and make sure that synchronous operations (infinite loops, requesting data over the network) do not block our thread.

In most browsers, each tab has its own event loop, this allows you to isolate the tabs from each other, and if one hangs, the others will continue to work. Otherwise, one hung operation could break the entire browser across all tabs.

In fact, the environment can simultaneously manage a large number of “event loops” to process API requests. WebWorkers also have their own event loop.

A JavaScript developer must be aware that his code is always executed in the same event loop, and be careful not to block it.

Blocking Event Loop

Any code that takes a long time to execute before returning control to the main thread will block the execution of any JavaScript code on the page. This also blocks the user interface, and the user cannot interact with it (click, scroll the page, etc.).

Almost all I / O operations in JavaScript are non-blocking – network requests, file system operations in Node.js, etc. The exception is blocking operations, which is why callbacks are so popular in JavaScript, and more recently all they are starting to use Promise and async / await more often.

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