Earlham College CS - Courses / CS 65

CS 65: Database Systems

[Last updated Term III, 1995-96 ]

Charles Peck
e-mail: charliep
Dennis 202B, x1667
Predictable office hours: 10am - 12pm Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday

General

The lectures in this course will to some extent review the reading and assignments and also push beyond them to discuss some of the underlying issues and related topics. I expect that you will come to class having done the reading and prepared to ask questions.

I encourage you to use e-mail as a way to correspond with each other and myself. There will be an alias for this class (CS65) set-up on the NeXT net which we can all use. If you regularly read your mail on the campus VAXen you can set-up your account to automatically forward your messages.

Description

This course is an introduction to database management systems. We will explore the topic from the perspective of a user, an application program, and from the database kernel itself. Although there are many different "flavors" of databases in use today we will focus primarily on relational database management systems (RDBMS) with some treatment of object-oriented database systems.

The text for the course is An Introduction to Database Systems, by C.J. Date. Now in its sixth edition this tome is widely regarded as one of the most complete and current textbooks covering the field. The concepts and terminology Date introduces are used by practitioners and scholars in the field. A good understanding of the text should provide easy access to any of the current research topics or challenging applications of database technology.

Assignments

I will give you the homework assignments for the week during class on Mondays. Assignments are due Friday morning during class. Late assignments will be reviewed as on-time ones are but you will not receive credit for them. Most of the assignments will be exercises from the text. During the second half of the term there will be programming projects in addition to the exercises from the text.

Schedule

Date	Reading
Week 1 (27-Mar, no class on 31-Mar)	Chapters 1 and 2)
Week 2 (3-Apr, no class on 3-Apr))	Chapters 3 and 4)
Week 3 (10-Apr))	Chapters 6 and 8)
Week 4 (17-Apr))	Chapters 12 and 13)
Week 5 (24-Apr, mid-term break))	Chapters 14 and 15)
Week 6 (1-May, class on 3-May))	Chapters 16 and 18)
Week 7 (8-May, class on 10-May))	Appendix A)
Week 8 (15-May))	Chapters 19 and 21)
Week 9 (22-May))	Chapters 22 and 24)
Week 10 (29-May))	Survey of existing RDBMS products)
Week 11 (5-June, finals))	Survey of existing RDBMS products)

Grading

Your grade for the course will be determined as follows:

Assignments	50%
Participation	25%
Final exam	25%