About GitHub
Technological advances in past few decades have hugely augmented the usage of Information Technology in business. IT in business includes the handling of several software and network based systems that are used to support and automate decision-making processes. At present, numerous software for managing business and information system have gained popularity that work for commercial application, managing database system, version control of applications and for many such purposes. In the selected workplace, the IT tools that have been used are GitHub, Microsoft Access, Oracle MySQL and Microsoft SQL (Dillon et al., 2014). Among these, the most popular software for developers, GitHub and Microsoft SQL are chosen to inspect its advantages and disadvantages as well as to provide some thoughtful suggestions to increase the effectiveness of their usage at workplace.
Generally, GitHub is defined as publishing and code sharing service as well as a social networking site exclusively for the programmers (Zhu, Zhou & Mockus, 2016). However, this definition does not encompass the entire utility of GitHub and that does not explain why it has been the center of popularity for the program developers. The principal aspect of GitHub is Git, which is an open source project launched by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux himself (Wu et al., 2014). Git is actually a software system for controlling versions and for storing and managing revised versions of projects. It is known as a crucial tool mostly used by the developer teams where the members are working on a single project. GitHub is commonly used for codes in order to avoid the clash of code changes; also it has been proved useful to keep records for all the alterations made in the project codes and that too for long-term as well as successfully maintains the record of reasons for the aforementioned changes (Huang et al., 2016). This software can also be used to administer files of other types, such as Final Cut projects or word documents. The most important functionality of this software is “forking” i.e. to copy a repository from the account of one user to another. Among other features, merge and pull request are the other functionalities that have rendered the service of GitHub so powerful and hence, popular.
On the other hand, the Microsoft SQL is a server managing relational database and was developed by the parent company Microsoft. Big business houses and larger organizations mainly use it to store and retrieve data requested by other software applications.
Behind GitHub’s incredible recognition in the developers’ world, there are certain advantages of it that contributes to its popularity even more. In the first place, GitHub makes it easier for the program developers to contribute to the most important open source assignments. In the present business world, GitHub, in the project management sector is used for almost all projects of open source kind (Legunsen et al., 2016). This is mainly because it is available free and nifty features like issue trackers and wikis are also included in it ensuring better credentials and feedback. Through this, the users not only are able to enjoy project management in an easier way but also they are able to identify the contributions that they receive from their working community. With the help of “forking”, a member can input his changes and thereafter via the web interface of GitHub, he can send it back using pull request (Thung et al., 2013).
Advantages of using GitHub
Another benefit of using GitHub is that it has the opportunity to turn everything into Markdown. Now, Markdown is a conversion tool popularly used by the web-writers converting texts into HTML format. The facility of having Markdown is that enables the writers to write the programming in an easy-to-read and easy-to-write plain text layout and then the tool structurally converts the whole writing into valid HTML (Vasilescu et al., 2014). Now, GitHub has transformed the whole writing process for the program developers by having everything processed through Markdown. It has facilitated the writers to say that, in GitHub, they do not need to learn one more language for having their content in a particular format. Apart from this, the additional markdown feature called GitHub flavored markdown only available in this IT tool, enables the writers to avail more advantageous programming environment (Mergel, 2015).
One more advantage of using GitHub is that it provides a help section and well-padded guide for articles so that a writer is never at shortage of content. GitHub consists of suggestions on almost every topic relevant to a git and one can always take clues from there while writing. For some instances, GitHub has content for writers to help them learn how to generate SSH keys, sample on the most excellent git workflow can also be found and apart from this, there are guide on gitinore and others available in abundance for the future planned projects (Jones, 2013).
Some features like GitHub Pages and Gists available in this IT tool have been proved beneficial indeed for the writers. The feature Gists was rolled out only a while back and it has become popular among the developers already. This allows the writers to translate one or numerous files into an active got repository. The greatest advantage of this new feature is that it has made sharing and following alterations made into the files of configuration and even in files that are more basic extremely easy (Smith, Jegatheesan & Kelly, 2016). Although they are not as abundant in terms of features as a full-scale GitHub repository, they offer great service even without the paid accounts. On the other hand, GitHub pages enable the writers to host websites, which are static by simply assigning pages of HTML onto a different repository other than a git one. With the help of these features in GitHub, blogging has become so much easier facilitated by further documentation or having a boost in the blogs’ web presence (Yu, Mishra & Mishra, 2014).
As for Microsoft SQL, the advantage of it lies in its easy access features and that is why most preferred to its competitors like MySQL. It provides complete support for triggers whereas in MySQL, the recently introduced triggers do not fully support. Besides, Microsoft SQL is closely integrated with .NET framework that is not available in other software, managing database (Moufarrege, 2017). Apart from this, Microsoft SQL is excellent in providing support for data recovery.
GitHub, though being extremely popular among the developers and bloggers has received a fair share of disapproval from a few. Some of the technology maestros have raised concerns for the complex nature of the tool. They have allegations against the non-user friendly nature of GitHub; by this, they have meant that the design of the GitHub service suits the purpose of the programmers more and in the terms of non-professionals may not correspond really well (Yu, Mishra & Mishra, 2014). Hence, the primary challenge remains in getting a strong hold on the operational features of this website with the psychological model that is definitely expected to ease time and practice.
Advantages of using Microsoft SQL
For the purpose of registering ideas or representing a creative process, GitHub is probably a little complicated in comparison to other similar sites like LayerVault and the like. Although GitHub is effective to track codes, it is more inefficient to track design. As designs are required to be interpreted into coding or for that matter when designs are needed to be exported to a production scenario, GitHub is not that effective (Smith, Jegatheesan & Kelly, 2016). Although this opinion varies and rather is conditional on the designers, some choose to draw on Command Line Interface of GitHub instead of availing its GUI or Graphic User Interface. This is mainly because for some the GUI of GitHub has been little confusing and most developers have admitted that they have learnt GitHub majorly using commands. However, the challenge lies in using commands for day-to-day operations, which tend to become a little bit awkward, especially in the cases of tracking the history of projects and addressing conflicts (Cardona, 2014). If simplified, the GUI version would have become more preferred than the commands simply because the capturing effect of the visual representation of the commands, amended files and the sheer difference in picture and text that is likely to create better sense.
To some on the platform of GitHub, the expenditure to possess a versioning repository has been a matter of challenge. Even if the investment is worth in terms of the facilities provided and especially if the user intends to use it on professional platform, for the non-professionals it may seem challenging to pay a considerably huge amount for a complicated website service.
Talking about the disadvantages of Microsoft MySQL, the licensing of its server is considerably expensive. Especially for small businesses and startups, it is almost impossible to afford this. Besides, the major drawbacks in using this is that Microsoft SQL is designed to run only on the Windows platform; moreover, is not compatible to interact with other applications running on different platforms (Moufarrege 2017).
Considering the drawbacks of GitHub, it has several scopes of improvement. In the first place, GitHub must initiate a free notification service that will enable the existing users to be informed as soon as any new updates on the programs that they have previously worked on are posted. Next, as mentioned there is no scope for making queries in case a user is unable to understand a certain program. Apart from this, for the non-professionals or the beginners it is extremely difficult to understand the operational process on GitHub and that information on the “How to Use” section is too less. It is recommended to introduce a video tutorial instruction on GitHub regarding operational procedures only to make it more user-friendly.
For Microsoft SQL, it is recommended to build the server compatible to other platforms than Windows keeping in the view that its competitor MySQL is compatible to all major platforms. MSSQL also needs to be a little faster especially in the case of straightforward db architectures.
Conclusion:
Thus, it can be said, reflecting on all the pros and cons of GitHub and MSSQL that these are an effective indeed though they have some limitations in usage. GitHub offers flexibility to users and use of GitHub is certainly worth the time, effort and investment. In brief, the code sharing service on a forum like platform that GitHub offers is a revolutionary idea in the world of IT business and therefore, is an effective tool for team of developers. On the other hand, MSSQL in spite of all the drawbacks, is preferred for its robust nature and efficiency in data management.
References:
Cardona, A. (2014). Collaborative annotation toolkit for massive amounts of image data (CATMAID) GitHub repository https://github. com/acardona.
Dillon, D. G., Pirie, F., Rice, S., Pomilla, C., Sandhu, M. S., Motala, A. A., & Young, E. H. (2014). Open-source electronic data capture system offered increased accuracy and cost-effectiveness compared with paper methods in Africa. Journal of clinical epidemiology, 67(12), 1358-1363.
Huang, W., Lu, T., Zhu, H., Li, G., & Gu, N. (2016, February). Effectiveness of Conflict Management Strategies in Peer Review Process of Online Collaboration Projects. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (pp. 717-728). ACM.
Jones, Z. M. (2013). Git/GitHub, transparency, and legitimacy in quantitative research. The Political Methodologist, 21(1), 6-7.
Legunsen, O., Hassan, W. U., Xu, X., Ro?u, G., & Marinov, D. (2016, September). How good are the specs? A study of the bug-finding effectiveness of existing Java API specifications. In Automated Software Engineering (ASE), 2016 31st IEEE/ACM International Conference on (pp. 602-613). IEEE.
Mergel, I. (2015). Open collaboration in the public sector: The case of social coding on github. Government Information Quarterly, 32(4), 464-472.
Moufarrege, S. (2017). Advantages & Disadvantages of Microsoft SQL | Techwalla.com. [online] Techwalla. Available at: https://www.techwalla.com/articles/advantages-disadvantages-of-microsoft-sql [Accessed 26 Apr. 2017].
Smith, S., Jegatheesan, T., & Kelly, D. (2016, November). Advantages, disadvantages and misunderstandings about document driven design for scientific software. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Software Engineering for HPC in Computational Science and Engineering (pp. 34-41). IEEE Press.
Thung, F., Bissyande, T. F., Lo, D., & Jiang, L. (2013, March). Network structure of social coding in github. In Software maintenance and reengineering (csmr), 2013 17th european conference on (pp. 323-326). IEEE.
Vasilescu, B., Van Schuylenburg, S., Wulms, J., Serebrenik, A., & van den Brand, M. G. (2014, September). Continuous integration in a social-coding world: Empirical evidence from GitHub. In Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), 2014 IEEE International Conference on (pp. 401-405). IEEE.
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Yu, L., Mishra, A., & Mishra, D. (2014, October). An Empirical Study of the Dynamics of GitHub Repository and Its Impact on Distributed Software Development. In OTM Confederated International Conferences” On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems” (pp. 457-466). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
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