Project resource requests

Summary

This page contains information detailing common requests that can be made for access to resources for projects being worked on by faculty and students, including students enrolled in 410 / 411. The purpose of this page is to explain what resources are readily available, what is currently not available, and best practices for using these resources.

Database Services

The department provides access to mssql and mariadb databases managed by the systems group. These databases are accessible by making a request for access to root@cs.odu.edu. There are instances where researchers and students working on projects want access to nosql databases such as mongodb, these are normally provided as a software package on a working virtual machine that the group in question in using.

The usage of databases in projects is for the organization and persistence of data for an application. Generally making use of flat file-system storage of data is a bad practice that results in significantly degraded application performance when handling large volumes of data and also exposes your applications to significantly more data loss. The systems group recommends relational databases for most applications, because the most popular ones, specifically mariadb and mssql, provide ACID compliant transactions.