Term 3 2021
Week 10 – Closing
By Helen Paik, CSE UNSW
Disclaimer: the course materials are sourced from previous offerings
of COMP9311 and COMP3311
COMP9311:
Database Systems
2What is “Database”?
Database
• ... a collection of related data ...
• Data items alone are relatively useless … We need the data to have some structure
Example:
• a student records database
– Contains information identifying students, courses they are enrolled in, results from
past courses, ...
• IMDb movie database
– Contains information about the movies, actors, theatres showing the movies, other
movies the director also directed in, …
3Databases cover a range of topics …
The field of databases deals with:
– data ... representing application scenarios
– relationships ... amongst data items
– constraints ... on data and relationships
– redundancy ... one source for each data item
– data manipulation ... declarative, procedural
– effective storage and retrieval of data … indexing, query processing
– transactions ... multiple actions, atomic effect
– concurrency ... multiple users sharing data
– scale ... massive amounts of data
4Overview: Database Systems
• Data models:
• ER
• Relational Data Model and their mapping
• Relational Algebra
• Database Programming Languages: SQL, PLpgSQL
• Relational Database Design: Functional Dependency, Normal Forms, Design Algorithms
for 3rd normal form and BC normal form
• Database Systems:
• Storage/Index (an overview)
• Query Evaluation (an overview)
• Transaction Management
• NoSQL databases
5Final Exam
Online exam. 26th November Friday 2pm – 5pm
This Friday (19th) from 1pm onwards, there will be a mockup exam session, simulating the
exact exam environment. You are encouraged to attend …. It is the last opportunity to
get your computing environment sorted for carrying out the exam.
• The link to the exam will be valid until the exam day.
The exam paper will be released through WebCMS3, you will submit your answers through
WebCMS3, similar to how you submitted your assignments.
Exam in Two Parts (out of 100) – total 3 hour exams
• (~30%) SQL and PLpgSQL programming 4-5 questions (allocate Max 1 hour)
• (~70%) Short and Long Answers (allocate 2 hours)
• Covers all topics except SQL and PLpgSQL
6Review your exercises before the exam
Do Lab exercises
Do exercises from the lectures
The Practical Part of the Exam:
Week 4 and Week 5 (SQL and PLpgSQL) – roughly split: 80% on SQL, 20% on PLpgSQL
The Theory Part of the Exam: - roughly split: 70% on Week 1,2,3&7, 30% on Week 8,9&10
Week 1 Data modelling
Week 2 Relational Model and ER to Relation Mapping
Week 3 Relational Algebra
Week 7 Relational Design Theory
Week 8 Storage, Index and Query Processing
Week 9 Transaction Management and Concurrency Control
Week 10 Other Database Systems