Data Management and Information Processing
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Presentation Transcript
Logistics • Instructor Yan Chen (ychen@cs.northwestern.edu), Office Hours: Th. 2-4pm or by appointment, Rm 330, 1890 Maple Ave. • TA Yi Qiao (yqiao@cs.northwestern.edu) Office Hours: Fri. 2-4pm, Rm 246, 1890 Maple Ave.
Prerequisites • Required: CS110, CS 111 or programming experience Course Materials • Required: A First Course in Database Systems,(2nd Edition), Jeffrey Ullman and Jennifer Widom, Prentice Hall, 2002. • Recommended: Database Management Systems, Third Edition, Raghu Ramakrishnan and Johannes Gehrke, McGraw-Hill, 2002.
Grading • Homework (4-5 sets) 20% • Projects 30% • Use Microsoft Access to design a database in two projects. • The first project is on the entity-relational (ER) model, • The second project is on relational algebra (RA) and relational calculus (RC). • Final 25% • Exams in-class, closed-book, non-cumulative • Late policy: 10% each day after the due date • No cheating
Communication • Web page: http://www.cs.nwu.edu/~ychen/classes/cs317/ • Recitation: Tu, Th or Fri? 5-6pm, Room 381, 1890 Maple. • TA lectures on the homework and projects, and help to prepare the exams. • Newsgroup are available • cs.317 (course announcement, and posting Q & A) • Send emails to instructor and TA for questions inappropriate in newsgroup • Course outline (see it online)
What Is a Database System? • Database: a very large, integrated collection of data. • Models a real-world enterprise • Entities (e.g., teams, games) • Relationships (e.g., The Forty-Ninersare playing in The Superbowl) • More recently, also includes active components , often called “business logic”. (e.g., the BCS ranking system) • A Database Management System (DBMS)is a software system designed to store, manage, and facilitate access to databases.
Database Systems: Today From Friendster.com on-line tour
Other Ways Databases Make Life Better? • “Players could finally sign up for the Star Wars Galaxies game last week as Sony opened up registration to the public.” • “Once players got in to the game they found that the game servers were offline because of database problems.” • “Some players spent hours tuning their in-game characters only to find that crashes deleted all their hard work.” • Source: BBC News Online, July 1, 2003.
Summary, cont. • DBAs, DB developers the bedrock of the informationeconomy • DBMS R&D represents a broad, fundamental branch of the science of computation
