Course pages 2016–17

Databases

Last change: Wed Mar 15 11:01:09 GMT 2017

Revision guide

• Since the syllabus has changed this year, many of the Past exam questions are no longer relevant.
• Topics that are no longer covered include functional dependencies and normal forms. For example, there is no need to revise for questions such as y2016p4q5.
• However, many other questions are still relevant. In particular those related to ER data modelling, implementing ER models in a relational database, and the balance between read-optimised representations of data and update-optimised representations of data. So one could imagine questions similar to y2016p4q6 or y2014p4q5.
• Of course there may be questions related to topics that are new to the syllabus, such as graph-oriented databases and document-oriented database. Although there are no past questions I have exposed the solutions to suggested supervisions and practical work to aid in your revision.

Lecture notes

• One slide per page: Databases_1B_2017.pdf
• Two slides per page: Databases_1B_2017_2up.pdf

Suggested supervisions

• supervision 1. solution notes
• supervision 2. solution notes
• supervision 3. solution notes

Practical work

• Relational databases using HyperSQL
• Getting started with HyperSQL
• The database system: relational-db.jar
• Data sets
• Small database (858.2 kB) : relational-small.zip
• Large database (657.4 MB): relational-large.zip
• HyperSQL exercises
• Solutions
• Graph-oriented using Neo4j
• Getting started with Neo4j
• The database system: graph-db.jar
• Data sets
• Small database (1.1 MB) : graph-small.zip
• Large database (581.3 MB): graph-large.zip
• Neo4j exercises
• Solutions
• Document-oriented using DoctorWho
• Getting started with DoctorWho
• The database system: document-db.jar
• The Java API : moviedb-javadocs
• Data sets
• Small database : document-small.zip
• Large database : document-large.zip
• DoctorWho exercises
• Solutions

Nothing below is examinable!

Bacon number in SQL: contest winner.

Some open source relational database systems

• HyperSQL : http://hsqldb.org.
• Postgres : http://www.postgresql.org/
• MySQL : http://www.mysql.com/
• SQLite : http://www.sqlite.org/

A few "NoSQL" pointers

Further reading

• 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.
• Data Cube: A Relational Aggregation Operator Generalizing Group-By, Cross-Tab, and Sub-Totals