General Class Information Class Handouts Scores Assignments Reference Materials Miscellaneous

CSc 460 Database Design Fall 2008 Lester I. McCann, Ph.D.

The University of Arizona College of Science Department of Computer Science McCann's Home Page

General Class Information

• Class syllabus (general course information)
• Class Announcements: The primary reference for class information outside of lectures is the cs.course460 news group on the CS dept. news server (news.cs.arizona.edu). See these instructions on how to configure your email client to access the server.
• Some thoughts about exams:
  • Characteristics of Good Exam Answers (suggestions on how to reply to short-answer exam questions)
  • Suggestions for Studying For and Taking Exams (what to do before and during an exam)
• Program Documentation and Development:
  • Programming Style Requirements (summary)
  • Toward Developing Good Programming Style (many documents here)
• A brief tutorial on using the turnin utility.

Class Handouts       (In case you lost your copy, or missed class)

• Class syllabus
• Indexing Handout (20080904)
• SPJ Schema (20080911)
• TRC and DRC Queries (20080930)
• Relational Algebra Queries (20081009)
• Normalization examples (20081030)

Current Course Grades       (Updated after each exam has been graded)

• Current Grades (Updated: 2008/11/18 1:45pm )

Assignments

• Homeworks:
  • Homework #1 Due: 09/30 (Sample Solutions)
  • Homework #2 Due: 10/21
  • Homework #3 Due: 10/30
    • Oracle 10g on-line documentation
    • Oracle software downloads
  • Homework #4 Due: MONDAY, 11/10, 3:30 p.m. (Sample Solutions)
• Programs:
  • Program #1: Text to Binary File Conversion Due: 09/09
    • BinaryIO.java, an example of how to read and write binary data in Java
    • 2008_FE_guide.csv, the fuel economy data for this assignment, as a comma-separated text file. Downloaded from Fuel Economy Data Download Page
    • 2008_FE_guide.txt, explanations for the fields and abbreviations. A direct copy of Fuel Economy Data Explanation.
  • Program #2: Extendible Hashing Due: 09/23
  • Program #3: Embedded SQL and JDBC Due: 12/09
    • 1990 and 2000 Gazetteer Data, the page with links to the data from the past two censuses.
    • JDBC.java, a demo JDBC program.

Reference Materials       (Pointers to additional information)

• The text for this semester is Fundamentals of Database Systems, 5th ed., by Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe.
  • Here's the author's latest errata list.
• We'll be doing a fair number of assignments that will involve interaction with the Oracle DBMS, and so I've also required Oracle 10g Programming: A Primer, by Rajshekhar Sunderraman. The bookstore should be selling new copies of this in a bundle with the text.
• I've created a resource page for LaTeX for those of you who would like to use it for formatting your answers to homework assignments.

Miscellaneous       (A place for stuff that doesn't really fit anywhere else)

• CC2001's List of Recommended Topics for a Database Course (plus a bunch of others)
• Collection of Common CS Service Links (Account application, compute CSID, etc.)
• The Ubiquitous B-tree (D. Comer, ACM Computing Surveys, 11, 2, June 1979) -- A good reference on B-trees, and the source of the B-tree definition I use. (Visit this link from a campus network to ensure that the paper is accessible.)
• division.sql -- Four ways to perform relational division in SQL.

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If you have any comments about this page, drop me a note at mccannl@acm.org