Database

In my personal and professional experience, I use a government construction database called Mitchell Humphrey. Their mission statement is, “Mitchell Humphrey takes great pride in being a “solution provider” and not just a “software vendor” (1). This database is used by borough construction departments to keep track of crucial information. For my job, it is my primary responsibly to maintain this database, keep it working smoothly, and keeping data current. Types of data stored include but is not limited to the following: homeowner information, contractor information, job types, violations, construction costs, revenue, and much more data. This database is a software tool installed on computers which gathers stored data from hard drives located on the main server. Databases such as this are important because according to Dr. Robert Latek, databases are important because it is, “efficient manipulation of large data sets” (2). The Mitchell Humphry database takes gigabytes of information daily and stores it on the server, and is capable of making the recall of that data, later on, a painless process. Without the database, it is quite likely the data would get disorganized, and lost. There is an interesting approach to a database I found, “…The relational database, a tabular database in which data is defined so that it can be reorganized and accessed in some different ways” (3). I wasn’t too familiar with these types of databases and was quite interested when I came across them. Mitchell Humphrey is much like a tabular database with its construction related data.

Answers toQuestions

1. What specific challenges does your database system implementation have?
There are a few challenges that Mitchell Humphrey’s implementation has in 2016. First off, it is become rather dated quickly. The most current operating system our database can run on is Windows 7. While Windows 7 is not bad, companies and governments might start to migrate to Windows 10 and Mitchell Humphrey does not have any data or support for Windows 10 yet.

2. In what ways does it provide competitive advantage for the organization using it?
There is a competitive advantage of using Mitchell Humphrey at my job. For starters, it has been a reliable database and software tool for us since 1995. With so much data, time, and knowledge invested in this database, it helps provide an edge when it comes time to input and recall data.

3. What improvements would you suggest?
My main suggestion for the database is to update it. Mitchell Humphrey has been a proven database for my job since the 90’s, and it is time to expand the capabilities. Moving from hard disk servers to the cloud would be a nice way to update the storing of data. I would also suggest the UI be updated because it does look like a 1990’s interface. Along with updating the UI, I would suggest that compatibility of the database be expanded to Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.

 Links
1) http://www.mitchellhumphrey.com/services/
2) http://jura.wi.mit.edu/bio/education/bioinfo-mini/db4bio/lecture1.pdf
3) http://searchsqlserver.techtarget.com/definition/database