Databases

This course consists of eight lectures and two Assessed Exercises.

Primary Materials

Lecture Slides PDF. For a written explanation of the lecture slides, please read the relevant sections of Lemahieu.
James Sharkey has written three tutorials for you to follow and learn in your own time (especially the first one):
1. Relational DBMS Tutorial HERE.
2. Document DBMS Tutorial HERE.
3. Graph DBMS Tutorial HERE.
Here are the IMDB snapshots you should be working with for 25/26 cst-ia-movies-2025-v1.zip. These are not the same as last year.
Learners' Guide and FAQ: Learners' Guide
Course textbook: Lemahieu, W., Broucke, S. van den and Baesens, B. (2018) Principles of database management. Cambridge University Press. The recommended textbook is widely available online, such as here: PDF. Please see the lecture notes for the recommended chapters. Note also that other parts of the book are highly relevant for the Part Ib Concurrency course.

-- As well as everything in the lecture notes (unless specifically marked non-examinable), you are expected to understand all the keywords in the glossaries below and to thorougly know the contents of the Relational Tutorial for Tripos examination.
-- You will need knowledge from the Relational and Document Tutorials to complete the two Assessed Exercises.
-- Understanding the principle differences between the three lectured database forms is part of the course syllabus and so Tripos questions will lightly touch on the contents of the Document and Graph Tutorials.

Glossaries

Two glossaries of keywords have been prepared.

You are expected to understand all the keywords in these glossaries, whether they explicitly appear in the lecture slides or not. Some concepts are just briefly mentioned in this course and are lectured in-depth within Discrete Maths.

Both glossaries are in this same file: Glossaries.

Assessed Exercises

There are two Assessed Exercises related to this year's course. Their timing is announced below, also in the lecture notes and, definitively, in the Head-Of-Department's notice.

Submission deadlines:

Exercise One: Tues 18th November 2025 - Noon
Exercise Two: Tues 2nd December 2025 - Noon

The first Exercise uses a relational database (SQLITE3 is recommended) and the second uses TinyDB. For the first Exercise, you are expected to have learned the basic SQL from the tutorial linked above. It contains examinable material.

There are two optional Help-and-Tick sessions. These will be in the Intel Lab starting at 2:00pm on Tuesday 13th and 27th of November 2025 and last 90 minutes or longer if necessary. Demonstrators will be available to help with Assessed Exercises problems. Attendance is not necessary.

To make it clear that everybody must submit only their own work, tasks for each candidate are slightly different from each other. Therefore, use your own worksheet or starter pack. A generic pack is also available for supervisors to look at. Submission is via Moodle. Much of the assessment of is automated, but there is a human element too. On upload you should receive an automated indication that the correct files were present. This is awarded 0.5 of a tick. You may generally expect for work to be marked within two working days of submission.

STARTER PACKS FOR THE FIRST EXERCISE WILL BE READY FOR YOU BY APPROXIMATELY THE THIRD WEEK OF TERM.

Vivas

A percentage of candidates will be randomly called for viva voce examination. These will be via zoom over the Michaelmas break or at the start of the Lent Term. The viva is a formal part of the Tripos assessment. It should last just a few minutes.

Supervision Materials

Supervision 1: Kick-off Supervision Materials and the Main Supervision Sheet 1.
Supervision 2: Main Supervision Sheet 2.
Supervision 3: Main Supervision Sheet 3.

Secondary Materials

For those with further interest:

Lecture 3 relates SQL to set theory because the lecturer said this is a good idea. An amusing and complementary point-of-view was given in this after-dinner speech by M. V. Wilkes, where he argues that A. Turing was misguided to consider set theory important for computing.

Interesting 'The Register' article: September 2023: MongoDB's SQL-to-NoSQL converter uses AI to smash the language barrier
A book on graph algorithms using Neo4j: Graph Algorithms (full text, PDF) note: most of the content relates to the Ia Algorithms course, rather than this course.
Perhaps look on previous years' pages for further suggestions ...

Last year’s course materials are still available.