Data Management and Information Processing

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 Course Materials 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-Niners are 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: Then

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.

Other databases you may use

Summary, cont. DBAs, DB developers the bedrock of the information economy DBMS R&D represents a broad, fundamental branch of the science of computation