Revision of course For examination purposes

Outline of Examination Question 1 is compulsory and is worth 40%. There are five other questions, of which you must answer 3. Each is worth 20%.

Question 1 Given a description, you are asked to design an ERD and write appropriate CREATE statements to set it up.

Other questions There is one question on data normalisation. The remaining questions involve the practical application of your knowledge of SQL and PL/SQL. –This means that you must know: How to do the queries and programs that you have been asked to do throughout the year. What the practical implications of running those queries / programs will be. –There is an addendum to the examination script that will give you some small amount of syntax.

Topics covered this year Data acquisition and storage Database definition Modelling notation Relational data and Normalisation Top-down and bottom-up data modeling. Relational algebra implementation Aggregation and sub-queries. Tables, views, procedures, functions, packages, sequences, cursors, triggers. Practical application through SQL Server and Oracle database management systems.

Revising for Question 1 Revise the ‘Data Model Notation’ tutorial from Semester 1. Try out the ‘Modeling Entities’ tutorial in Semester 1. Do tutorials 1 to 6 in Semester 1. Go back over your cross-curricular assignment and revise the reasons you came up with the data model that you used. –Did it work well? If so, why? If not, why not?

Revising for the Data Normalisation question Go back over the Normalisation Lectures: –FirstNormalForm.ppt andFirstNormalForm.ppt –L04MoreNormalisation.pptL04MoreNormalisation.ppt –Try the normalisation questions from the old papers (See P: drive) –Try normalising the Wellingtons documents.

Revising for the other questions Read over the lecture notes on database design, structure, features and algebra. Look over the queries that you have implemented. –Try to remember any errors that you got –Why did that error occur? –How did you fix it? –Was it a structural or syntactical error?

Revising for the other questions Look over the programs you have written. –What was their structure? –How were they called? –Was the program resident in the DBMS or did you need to load it each time? –What caused the program to run? –What errors did you encounter? –How did you fix them? –What did you learn from them?

Revising for the other questions There is no need to go back over SQL Server, but you DO need to go back over the queries that you were asked to run in SQL Server. Look at the data manipulation commands: –Insert –Update –Delete What sort of errors can you get? Why? Look at the Select –How does it join tables? How does it pick some rows and not others? How does it eliminate rows? How does it sum / count some fields?

Revision for the other questions What sort of problems require PL/SQL? How is PL/SQL used? Think about step-wise refinement. Are there sequence / selection / iteration commands in it? Do you need to call subroutines? Do you need to lock out others? What is the difference between a script and a PL/SQL block? What does a transaction require?