Course pages 2014–15

Databases

Never forget to ask What problem am I solving?

Lecture Slides:

• One-slide per page: db2015.pdf
• Two-slides per page: db2015_2up.pdf (huge file!)
Revised version of Lecture 6
• One-slide per page: db_2015_lecture_6.pdf
• Two-slides per page: db_2015_lecture_6_2up.pdf
Lecture 11
• One-slide per page: db2015_L11.pdf
• Two-slides per page: db2015_L11_2up.pdf
Lecture 12 (cancelled)
• Grant Allen (from Google) had to cancel his guest lecture. Here are the slides from his talk given in 2014.
• http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1314/Databases/BigData_NoSQL_Grant_Allen_Cambridge_2014.pdf
• Ken Moody's relational database early history KM-DB-history.pdf

A few SQL examples that may clarify the relational implementation of many-to-many and one-to-many relationships (from an ER model).

• movies.sql, colleges_v1.sql, colleges_v2.sql, colleges_v3.sql.

Relational division example : relational_division.sql.

Some sample supervision question sets and are available for you to use/edit and extend on the Online Teaching Site (courtesy of Andrew Rice)

• Problem set 1 : http://ott.cl.cam.ac.uk/questions/sets/310.
• Problem set 2 : http://ott.cl.cam.ac.uk/questions/sets/343.
• Problem set 3 : http://ott.cl.cam.ac.uk/questions/sets/350.

Some open source database systems :

• HyperSQL : http://hsqldb.org.
  • To use from Java code (as used in Further Java) : Unzip the archive file, change to extracted directory, then launch a database GUI with java -cp {YOURPATH}hsqldb.jar org.hsqldb.util.DatabaseManagerSwing.
  • To use the read-execute-print loop use sqltool.jar, java -jar {YOURPATH}sqltool.jar. You may have to set up a sqltool.rc file in your home directory as documented at http://hsqldb.org.
• Postgres : http://www.postgresql.org/
• MySQL : http://www.mysql.com/
• SQLite : http://www.sqlite.org/

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.
• Data Cube: A Relational Aggregation Operator Generalizing Group-By, Cross-Tab, and Sub-Totals
• Hoare Logic : An axiomatic basis for computer programming, CAR Hoare, 1969

iMDB data:

• Raw iMDb data files
• Handy Python package for manipulating iMDB raw data http://imdbpy.sourceforge.net/

Of interest (reading for the fun of it):

• Guest lecture from Lent 2012 on schema migration in the NHS cancer database.
• Dr. Jean Bacon asks What is a key?
• 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
• Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets
• F1: A Distributed SQL Database That Scales

Never forget to ask What problem am I solving?