General Class Information Class Handouts Scores Assignments Reference Materials Miscellaneous

CSc 460 Database Design Summer 2009 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)
• Pre-Class FAQs: I anticipate that you might have questions on a variety of topics before class begins. I'll try to assemble responses here, for the benefit of other students. That is, if you have a question, look here first for an answer before you email me!
• 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)
• All electronic assignment submissions will be accepted by the Dropbox on the CSc 460 D2L site.
• The video and audio recordings of the lectures, along with the lecture slides, will be available from this web page. Please note that this page is password-protected. Access information will be emailed to enrolled students.

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

• Class syllabus
• Programming Style Requirements (summary)
• SPJ Schema (from 20090611)
• Relational Algebra Queries (20090617)
• Embedded and Dynamic SQL APIs in Postgres (20090630)
• Postgres' libpq API (20090630)
• I also handed out a printout of the JDBC demo that will accompany Program #3. You can find that program file here.
• Frequent Itemset and Association Rule Identification Algorithms (20090707)

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

• Final Grades (Updated: 2009/07/09 5:20pm )

Assignments

• Homeworks:
  • Homework #1 Due: 06/18
  • Homework #2 Due: 06/24
  • Homework #3 Due: 06/29
    • Oracle 10g on-line documentation
    • Oracle software downloads
  • Homework #4 Due: 07/02
• Programs:
  • Program #1: Due: 06/11
    • BinaryIO.java, an example of how to read and write binary data in Java
    • TexasBirths1950-1954.txt, the text data file. WARNING: This is a relatively large file (over 40MB)!
  • Program #2: Dynamic Hashing Due: 06/16
    • TexasBirths1950.txt, the text data file.
  • Program #3: JDBC Due: 07/08
    • http://dpi.wi.gov/oea/spr_wrct.html, the source of the spreadsheet files.
    • JDBC.java, the sample JDBC program discussed in Topic 9.

Reference Materials       (Pointers to additional information)

• The text for this semester is Database Systems, 5th ed., by Thomas Connolly and Carolyn Begg.
  • Please be aware that the book is available in electronic form from CourseSmart for substantially less that the price of the traditional dead-tree version, but with an 180-day access restriction. I don't care which version you get (paper, on-line, or downloadable), but you'll want at least one of them!
  • Normally, I'd provide an errata list for the text here, but as the book is brand new, there isn't one yet.
• We'll be doing at least two assignments that will involve interaction with the Oracle DBMS. Our text has decent coverage of Oracle, but if you want additional info, you might consider buying Oracle 10g Programming: A Primer, by Rajshekhar Sunderraman.
• 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.
• Curious about what does and does not count as 'academic dishonesty'? My Academic Dishonesty Quiz should be an eye-opener!

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). The complete CC2001 document is available as a PDF file here.
• 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