Databases (dDB)

First quarter (Q1) 2007

The course focuses on principles, design and implementation of databases.

Course teacher is Louis Salvail, and the following teaching assistants (TA's):

Kristian Ellebęk Kjęr(twice), Tuesday 14-17 and Thursday 14-17 (argoATdaimi.au.dk)
Martin Geisler(twice), Wednesday 8-11, Wednesday 11-14 (mgATdaimi.au.dk).

We use the book "Database Systems - The Complete Book" by Garcia-Molina, Ullman and Widom. The bookstore (Gad Stakbogladen, Naturfag) has been notified and should have a sufficient amount of copies in store.

The lecture will take place:

Monday, 14:00-16:00, Datalogisk(Store) Auditorium.
Friday, 12:00-13:00, Datalogisk(Store) Auditorium.

The course evaluation is made according a PASS/FAIL home assignment. In order to be allowed to pass the exam, all mandatory assignments made during the quarter must have been accepted by your TA.

News

22/08/07: There will be an introduction to the course and to databases on August 27th, 14:00.
22/08/07: There will be no TŲ during the first week.
31/08/07: The slides for the first lecture (Monday, August 27th) can be found here. The keynote directory can be found here.
31/08/07: The slides for the second lecture (Friday, August 31th) can be found here. The keynote directory can be found here.
07/09/07: The slides for the third lecture (Monday, September 3rd) can be found in HTML and in PDF.
10/09/07: The slides for the fourth lecture (Friday, September 7) can be found in HTML and in PDF.
20/09/07: Here is the description of the Baseball databases that I'm using. Don't expect my queries to be the best ones since it has changed a lot recently. You can even try to re-formulate the queries on the slides below in a better way.
20/09/07: The slides for the fifth lecture (Monday, September 10) can be found in HTML and in PDF.
20/09/07: The slides for the sixth lecture (Friday, September 14) can be found in HTML and in PDF.
27/09/07: The slides for the seventh lecture (Monday, September 17) can be found in HTML and in PDF.
27/09/07: The slides for the eight lecture (Friday, September 21) can be found in HTML and in PDF.
05/10/07: The slides for the ninth lecture (Monday 24) can be found in HTML and in PDF.
05/10/07: The slides for the 10^th lecture (Friday 28)can be found in HTML and in PDF.
10/10/07: The slides for the 11^th lecture (Monday 1)can be found in HTML and in PDF.
10/10/07: The slides for the 12^th lecture (Friday 5)can be found in HTML and in PDF.
17/10/07: The slides for the 13^th lecture (Monday 8)can be found in HTML and in PDF.
17/10/07: The slides for the 14^th lecture (Friday 12)can be found in HTML and in PDF.

General information

Exercise classes

All groups for the TŲ sessions are provided here.

If you do not appear in one of these lists please contact the student information in order to make sure you're register.

Mandatory work

There will be group projects, and a final evaluation consisting of individually written reports (pass/fail - no grading) based on the project work.

All mandatory exercises will be derived from one mandatory project. The description of this project will be given a little bit later.

Mandatory project

Exercises for course week 1

Exercises for course week 2

Exercises for course week 3

Exercises for course week 4

Exercises for course week 5

Exercises for course week 6 (I don't expect to modify it anymore unless I see that I got seriously confused again)

Exam

Basically, the final exam is a suitably updated version of all mandatory exercises. Follow the link for the exact formulation of the exam project report in due time. The exam is due by October the 26th (not sure about this one, this could be a few days after or before).

Tools

This year we use mySQL database management system. You can find information on how to create your own mySQL database using the muser script:

      /users/mysql/linux/daimi/muser

This will return a password and will create an empty database for you. You cannot create other databases than this one. Then you can connect to the host with:

      mysql -h mysql.daimi.au.dk -u $USERNAME -p

You'll then be asked to provide the password returned by the muser script. You can use the PHPMyAdmin tool by connecting to the URL:

     http://mysql.daimi.au.dk.

This will allow you to define your schema and input your data in. You can also use this GUI to make SQL query to your database.

Make sure that you store your password since you cannot re-create a new account once one has been issued. Consult the mySQL reference manual to get a more compelete picture of mySQL 4.1.20 (in particular what differs from the SQL standard).

For connecting with JDBC you need JDBC (jar file) in your class path. Then, in order to connect to a database, you can use this template. It simply connects to the localhost/test database and prints out the first column of the test relation.