Discussion Question
Have you ever used a pre-experimental design (e.g., tried doing something in a new way and observing for its effects without a control group) in any of your professional or everyday activities? If so, briefly describe it. Discuss whether your activity shed light on a cause-and-effect relationship.
Response
One of the applications that I have worked with is an application that allows clinical staff to view patient records in the event of a downtime. This works by taking data from the database, storing it in another database used for downtimes, and then pushing the data down to client PCs. I noticed that the downtime application was having issues with tables related to data on our scheduling tables, but only for one database. Since there was only database having the issue, we had no opportunity for a control group after we implemented a fix. We recognized that the issue might be with the massive amount of data being written to the scheduling tables and the downtime application not being able to keep up with the amount of data coming into it. To resolve, we tried implementing indexes on the database that would tell it to pull data in a new way, it would only pull rows of data that contained information. After making the change, we allowed the data to catch up and saw that going forward the downtime application did not have any issues processing the scheduling tables with the index in place.
From this experiment we learned that blank rows were causing too much data to flow into the downtime application. With the index in place, it didn’t allow blank rows to enter the downtime application, and this prevented the downtime application from falling behind.
Heather, I am very impressed with your week 7 post. I have limited experience with actual experiments. I can recall I have only done some in high school and besides that nothing at all. I think that you and your coworkers being able to solve the problem of the downtime application having trouble scheduling tables. You were able to figure out that the one database that was having issues and then thinking of ways to solve the problem. The problem was solved and by changing the way the database pulls data and it would only pull rows with actual data in them. The fact that you were able to relate a real-life experience to the content in the book is amazing. Your post was a pleasure to read.
I work in IT and deal with databases a lot. I thought this post was interesting since you were able to relate a real life experience to the discussion question it and it was something I have experience with.
Having a control group would have made troubleshooting the issue a lot easier, but unfortunately things don’t always work that way with computers.