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Tools to use in an information technology class – and best of all they are

FREE!

Dewey Swanson

Associate Professor, CIT

Associate Professor, CIT

Introduction

Purdue Polytechnic has several locations in the state of Indiana offering students a chance to get

a Purdue degree. The Computer and Information Technology (CIT) department offers the CIT degree

at three sites in Indiana: Anderson, Columbus and Kokomo. CIT offers several potential majors includ-

ing Cybersecurity, Network Engineering, Systems Analysis. At the Columbus site we offer the Com-

puter & Information Technology major. This major is a general degree that would have a variety of

CIT offerings in all of the majors mentioned. Each statewide site of Purdue Polytechnic has multiple

labs including approximately 30 throughout the state (including labs used for CIT and other programs)

that must be maintained with an annual budget of approximately $200,000 for hardware and software.

were looking for low cost or no cost options. The best news is all of the options we will discuss in this

paper are free. The following pages discuss the products we found.

VirtualBox

VirtualBox is a category of virtual machine software or VM that can provide the user an emulation of a

particular computer that the user can manage and use. This can be a complete substitute of real ma-

chine in which the user can install operating systems and other software of choice. VirtualBox was ini-

tially offered by Innotek GmbH which was bought out by Sun Microsystems and subsequently by Ora-

cle Corporation and rebranded by the official name of Oracle VM VirtualBox. VirtualBox is free Open

Source Software. On their website Oracle describes VirtualBox as “a powerful x86 and

AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. VirtualBox is an extremely

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cluding but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8,

Windows 10), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4, 2.6, 3.x and 4.x), Solaris and OpenSolaris, OS/2, and

OpenBSD as in Figure 1 shown with Fedora 21 running.”

Purdue University’s main campus has a site license for VMware which is also virtualization software.

Both VMware and VirtualBox provide similar capabilities. In our case we are not looking to replace

VMware but have VirtualBox as an additional option. There are several advantages for our students to

use VirtualBox. The biggest advantage is that it is standalone, meaning that once installed the student

does not need to be connected to the network to use. Although, connecting to a network is not generally

a big issue it does make its use more portable. It does not require the student to set up a VPN or con-

nect to a remote desktop as required by VMware. Another advantage is that with the Oracle purchase of

erating system and software utilized. Finally, you need to be running one of the supported operating

systems. Another negative of VirtualBox is that there is no local support if students have issues in-

stalling or using the software. Since VMware is located on Purdue servers, it does not require the stu-

dent to have a powerful machine with any disk or memory requirements and is totally supported by the

Purdue IT Support.

We currently use VirtualBox in CNIT 487 Database Administration. This is an upper level CIT class

used as an introduction for students in the role of Database Administrator (DBA). The database soft-

ware we us in the class is the Oracle DBMS. Virtualization is useful in this class because in order to

manage an Oracle database students are required to have administrator privileges on the machine and

Purdue support is justifiably unwilling to give students that capability in Purdue labs. Several years ago

we had in the class.

As mentioned VirtualBox is free and documentation and downloads can be accessed at :

https://www.virtualbox.org/ .

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Figure 1. VirtualBox 5.0 for Mac OS X with VirtualBox Fedora 21 running

Oracle SQL Developer

SQL Developer is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that provides programmers and

administrators with tools to automate many of the development functions. According to Oracle it

DBA capabilities to perform tasks such as backup/recovery, auditing, user management, and stor-

age management. The tool is also compatible with the CASE tool SQL Developer Data Modeler

(discussed later in the paper).

the release 11g when Oracle quit shipping the product with the Oracle database software. There are

also third party products such as TOAD from Dell Software that is offered both freeware and com-

mercial (running $975 a seat on up). Oracle SQL Developer has many advantages over the previ-

ous product SQL*Plus which was strictly a command-line interface as opposed to the GUI interface

provided by SQL Developer. The tool supports not only command line execution of SQL com-

mands but has an editor to support development using PL/SQL language as shown in Figure 2. The

product is an .exe file and requires no installation as opposed to SQL*Plus that required the user to

install the Oracle client. This is not particularly important for lab machines but made use of the

tool easier for students at home. TOAD has an advantage of being able to access multiple data-

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ming and CNIT 392 Enterprise Data Management. We have been using the product for several

years now. Students using the product at home have said that it is easier to use than SQL*Plus.

The only real issue we have had was a performance issue when we installed a newer version in our

labs.

https://www.oracle.com/downloads/index.html.

Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler

SQL Developer Data Modeler or Data Modeler is part of SQL Developer or a standalone product

(what we will discuss in this paper). Data Modeler is a graphical tool that can be used to create and

maintain logical, relational (as shown in Figure 3) and physical models. The main model used in

database design is an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD). Data Modeler supports development of

ERDs using both the Bachman and Barker notation. Besides creating and maintaining Entity Rela-

tionship Diagrams (ERDs) the tool can be used to forward and reverse engineer databases. The tool

can also be used to develop process models – Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs). Data Modeler can be

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over Designer. Designer was difficult to install in the labs and support and most students didn’t

bother to try and install it at home. It also tended to run very slow and if more than a few users

were on it ran extremely slow. Visio is still used on lab machines (mainly in systems classes) be-

cause it has the advantage of including not only ERDs but also able to model in UML including

Class Diagrams, Use Cases, Sequence Diagrams along with Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs). A disad-

vantage of Visio is that students have to buy it because it is not included in any agreements between

Purdue and Microsoft Corporation, unlike Oracle Data Modeler which is free for students to down-

load.

Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler is installed in all of the statewide labs that have CIT programs

and used by most students that want to access the Oracle server with their personal computers. We

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dition to offering a free version, GameMaker: Studio has the advantage of providing an intuitive Drag

and Drop system that makes the learning curve less steep and allows a student to quickly put together

2D games of such common genres as mazes and platformers. Presenting a mild disadvantage, the

scripting for this game engine has to be done in a special scripting language called GML (GameMaker

Language) based on C. Unity 5 allows scripting in C#, a language that our undergraduate students

would have programmed in for at least two semesters prior to taking the pilot course. On the positive

side, unlike C#, GML supports the aforementioned Drag and Drop system. GameMaker: Studio can be

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