Course material 2010–11
Databases
2010–11
Principal lecturer: Dr Timothy Griffin
Taken by: Part IB
Syllabus
Past exam questions
Information for supervisors: this year's lectures are placing a bit more emphasis on Entity-Relationship (ER) modelling. However, past exams are the best indication of what students can expect in terms of tripos questions in 2011. In future years, the exam questions may also change to reflect this slight shift of emphasis, but not this year.
Lecture notes:
- Lectures 1 to 3 : one slide per page, or two slides per page.
- Lecture 4 : one slide per page, or two slides per page.
- Lectures 5 to 7 : one slide per page, or two slides per page.
- Lectures 8 to 12 : one slide per page.
- wow, those _2up.pdf files are really large! Here's the command I use:
- pdf2ps foo.pdf; psnup -f -2 -pa4 -c -m5 -s1.3 foo.ps foo_2up.ps ; ps2pdf foo_2up.ps
A few useful links:
- Slides for SKS book (6th edition) : http://db-book.com/db6/slide-dir
- An interesting collection of high-level data models : http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_models/index.htm
- Data modeling tutorials : http://www.databaseanswers.org/tutorials.htm
- Modeling by example : http://www.databaseanswers.org/book_on_data_modelling.htm
- A Comparative Analysis of Entity-Relationship Diagrams : http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/song/publications/p_Jcse-erd.PDF
- The problems with OLAP : http://www.information-management.com/issues/20070301/1076555-1.html
Some open source code :
- Postgres : http://www.postgresql.org/
- MySQL : http://www.mysql.com/
- SQLite : http://www.sqlite.org/
iMDB data:
- Raw iMDb data files
- Handy Python package for manipulating iMDB raw data http://imdbpy.sourceforge.net/
Primary sources:
- Tarkski's 1941 paper "On the Calculus of Relations".
- A short biography of Alfred Tarski http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Tarski.
- Codd's original 1970 paper describing the relational model (reprinted here in 1983).
- A short biography of Edgar Codd http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_F._Codd.
- Chen's original 1976 paper on Enitity-Relationship models.
- A short biography of Peter Chen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Chen.
- Fagin's definition of multivalued dependencies.
Counter Culture :
- NoSQL Movement : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoSQL_(concept)
- Berkeley DB : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_DB
- Graph Databases : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_database
But never forget to ask What problem am I solving?