Comp 468 Fall 2003

Peter Dordal, Loyola Univ Chicago Dept of Computer Science.

The text is the new third edition of Ramakrishnan & Gehrke's Database Management Systems.

My general course groundrules are here. Exams will count for between 70% to 80% of your grade, with homework and programs making up the rest. There will be one midterm (moved to Monday, October 20) and a final. The final will be Wednesday, Dec 10, 3:00-5:00 pm (this is the slot in the schedule for courses meeting at 3:50 pm; close enough).

Here are my evolving course notes

Here are the most current notes about what will be covered on the final exam., updated Monday Dec 8.

Some final exam study exercises are also available; some exercises are listed here, though, that may be from sections that will not be on the exam.

Solutions to the study exercises are here, although they are still not complete as of 10:00 pm Monday.

See the study exercises page for more information about extra midterm credit.

Here are the previous notes for the midterm exam.

Here are the SQL notes that you will be given during the final.

Here is the first homework assignment, for the convenience of those who don't yet have the text.

The second homework assignment is as follows: Chapter 5: exercises 2, 3.1-3.6, 3.9; Chapter 19: exercises 2, 4.1, 6, 7, 8.2

Solutions to homework 2 are here.

The programming project is here. The database is available in MS Access format. You can also use other databases, eg Oracle; here is the data in text file format (multiple files).

The makeup programming project is here; there is a link on that page to the Access database it uses. You can earn extra credit to be applied to your midterm (up to a maximum of 80) either with this assignment, or with the final exam study exercises, or both; see the latter document for more details.

The assignment is not necessarily complete yet, in that I may add some queries. I may also supply some access-related hints, eg how to refer to attribute names with spaces in them.

The goal of this course is to learn how databases are designed, together with some underlying implementation issues. We will focus almost exclusively on the relational database model. Database programming is the topic of another course, though students will do some modest programming in Oracle and another database (probably the Minibase referred to in the textbook). The language will be SQL (Structured Query Language, the standard DB query language), coupled at times with Java. It is also possible that some exercises involving MS Access will be assigned. All software used in the course will be available in the CS computing labs.

Oracle Information

Oracle was installed on the six machines along the west wall of Damen 341. Use the account SYSTEM; the password was announced in class. Be aware that any changes you make will persist for the next user.

The file demo.text contains SQL statements to rebuild the tables for the sailors/boats/reservations example in chapter 5; copy/paste into your SQL window as necessary.