Last year's lecture slides, exam paper and answers can be found
here.
Here is last year exam and
answers .
Labs
Labs start on the 18th of February (Wednesdays 10-12 in A32). There are no
labs after the Easter break.
Coursework
Coursework 1 on relational algebra and E/R modelling: cw1 .
Submission deadline: 13 February at 16:00 to the School office.
Model solution to cw1 By the way, solutions
which removed an M:M relationship by creating an extra entity between Order and Product
(similarly to an Enrolment entity we created between Students and Modules in lecture
4) are better, because they are easier to transform into database tables
( here is an example). However,
since the question did not explicitly require an ER diagram without M:M relatioships
leaving it as in the model solution was not penalised.
Coursework 2 on SQL (creating tables): cw2 .
Submission deadline: 20 February at 23:59 to cw system (coursework id is 183).
Please try to get it marked in the lab on the 18th. Late submissions are
allowed until 16:00 on the 27th of February but will have some penalty points
subtracted.
Model solution for cw2 . The main problems were getting used to
sqlplus, getting passwords, and finding typos. The only real mistake I remember from
the labs was that when a foreign key should match some combination of columns in the referenced
table which uniquely identifies a tuple there, like (Cdate, Place) in Result uniquely
identifies
a tuple in Competition, some students declared two separate foreign keys from Result
into Competition,
one Cdate and another Place. Also, the order of dropping tables matters, the tables which are referenced
(like Competition) will not be dropped while the referencing table (like Result) is still there.
If you are not sure why, read up on referential integrity.
Coursework 3 on SQL (select): cw3 .
Submission deadline: 6 March at 23:59 to to cw system (coursework id is 189).
Please try to get it marked in the lab on the 25th of February or the 4th of
March.
Model solution to cw3 . The most common mistake was
to look up IDs of directors or movies and then hard-wire them into your SQL statement.
Coursework 4 on SQL (select, group by): cw4 .
Submission deadline: 20 March at 23:59 to to cw system (coursework id is 191).
Optional coursework 6: cw6
Submission deadline: 15 May at 23:59 to cw coursework ID 209.
Lecture slides
Lecture 1 (Introduction) 6 slides to a page
First paper about relational model:
E.F. Codd. A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks.
Pdf file kindly made available by the ACM can be found here.