Course Catalogue

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From the basic skills derived in CS1F, to develop the software engineering and database administration skills required for designing, creating, running and developing a relational database application and its associated application software suite.

Understanding of how conventional programming languages (e.g., Java/JDBC) interact with databases;

Understanding of the fundamental concepts, functional dependency and normalization theories and methods of the relational data model;

Understanding the principles of database indexing, file structures, hash-based file structures, tree-based indexes;

Understanding the cost-based query optimization methods;

Understanding the principles of selection selectivity and joint selectivity using histograms in query optimization;

Introduction to data analytics tasks and advanced methods & techniques.

Two one-hour lectures and one one-hour tutorial per week.

Web Application Development 2 (or equivalent)

Object Oriented Software Engineering 2 (or equivalent)

Java Programming 2 (or equivalent) 

None 

None

Examination 80%

Assessed coursework 20%

Reassessments are normally available for all courses, except those which contribute to the Honours classification. For non Honours courses, students are offered reassessment in all or any of the components of assessment if the satisfactory (threshold) grade for the overall course is not achieved at the first attempt. This is normally grade D3 for undergraduate students and grade C3 for postgraduate students. Exceptionally it may not be possible to offer reassessment of some coursework items, in which case the mark achieved at the first attempt will be counted towards the final course grade. Any such exceptions for this course are described below. 

The coursework cannot be redone because the feedback provided to the students after the original coursework would give any student redoing the coursework an unfair advantage

From the basic skills derived in CS1F, to develop the software engineering and database administration skills required for designing, creating, running and developing a relational database application and its associated application software suite.

Understanding of how conventional programming languages interact with databases;

Understanding of the fundamental concepts, functional dependency and normalization theories and methods of the relational data model;

Understanding the principles of database indexing, file structures, hash-based file structures, tree-based indexes;

Understanding the cost-based query optimization methods;

Understanding the principles of selection selectivity and joint selectivity using histograms in query optimization;

Introduction to data analytics tasks and advanced methods & techniques.

By the end of the course students will be able to:

1. Demonstrate competence in performing sophisticated queries and updates against an existing RDBMS using most of the advanced features of SQL standard;

2. Demonstrate skills in designing, writing, changing and testing programs (e.g., Java/JDBC) that use an RDBMS;

3. Interpret and optimize SQL queries based on the principles of the cost-based query optimization;

4. Provide an explanation of the database indexing techniques including File Hashing, Search Trees, Multi-level Indexes, B Trees and B+ Trees;

5. Specify advanced constraints on the DB scheme based on Functional Dependencies & Normalization;

6. Appreciate Data analytics and aggregation tasks and techniques;

7. Provide an explanation of the selection selectivity and join selectivity using histograms for query optimization.

Students must submit at least 75% by weight of the component (including examinations) of the course's summative assessment.