CSci 4707 Practice of Database Management Systems , Fall 2009

Tuesday and Thursday, 11:15 AM - 12:30 PM, EE/CSci 3-230

Role:

Name

Office

Office Hours
Email

Professor

S. Shekhar

EE/CS 5-203

T/Th 10AM-11AM
shekhar@cs.umn.edu

TA

Xun Zhou

EE/CS 2-209

M/F 2:30PM-3:30PM
xun@cs.umn.edu

Web Pages: Schedule, Homeworks, Class Notes, Instructor Announcements, TA Announcements, Teams, GRIT
Course Home Page: http://www.spatial.cs.umn.edu/Courses/Fall09/4707/index.html

Text Book: Michael V. Mannino, Database: Design, Application Development & Administration, Third Edition, McGraw Hill, 2007, ISBN 0-07-294220-7. Recommended (for labs): Jonathan Gennick, Oracle SQL*Plus Pocket Reference, O'Reilly Press, Second Edition, ISBN 0596004419.

Topics: Fundamental concepts and database architecture and Relational Data Model Query languages like SQL and DML, Database design at the conceptual (Entity Relationship Model), logical (Normalization), and physical (Index, Query Optimization) levels, Applications such as transaction processing and data warehousing, Current trends like Object DBMS.

Examinations and Assignments: The weighting scheme used for grading is: Midterm exam - 30%, Final exam - 30%, Assignments - 30%, Class Participation - 10%. There are two necessary conditions for passing this class: (1)Submission of all assignments;(2)Scoring at least 50% on the final examination. There are 4 homeworks, some of which may require programming. Form groups of two to submit homeworks. All assignments must have your team number, names, student IDs, and course name/number. Each team should only submit one copy of the homework. A sample midterm exam can be found here.

Class participation includes database news and active learning. Each group will review database related news for at least one week and present selected news items in the class. During active learning, students will work in a small group of two or three on an exercise or a discussion question provided in the class meeting. After this, a randomly chosen student will be invited to summarize the discussion in his/her group. Other students in the class may paraphrase and improve the presented material.

The final grade will not be based solely on absolute percentage, but the median and standard deviations of the class (i.e., Bell Curve). Students in the previous 4707 class having an average around the median received a B as their final grade.

Late Submission Policy: Assignments must be handed in at the beginning of the class on the specified due date (always a Tuesday). Late homeworks should be submitted to the 4707 class mailbox in the Computer Science department main office in 4-192 by 4:30 PM. Note that this is NOT Professor Shekhar's mailbox, it is the class mailbox labeled 4707. If you aren't sure what to do just ask the receptionist. DO NOT submit assignments in EE/CS 5-203. A penalty of 30% will be deducted from score for the first 24-hour period your assignment is late. A penalty of 70% will be deducted from score beyond a 24-hour period. The following is, roughly, the weight distribution for laboratory problems: Correctness - 60%, Test Results Summary - 10%, Code readability including comments - 15%, Approach and Report - 15%, Report should discuss assumptions and findings.

Cheating/Collaboration: Getting help from services like general debugging service (GDS), web-sites (e.g. cheaters.com), copying someone else's assignment, or the common solution of written or programming assignments will be considered cheating. Interaction for the purpose of understanding a problem is not considered cheating and will be encouraged. However, the actual solution to problems must be one's own.

Helpful Comments: This class is very interesting and useful. We will uncover concepts underlying database design, querying, and administration. Practitioners may be invited as guest lecturer during discussion of topics. To get full benefit out of the class you have to work regularly. Read the textbook regularly and start working on the assignments soon after they are handed out. Plan to spend at least 10 hours a week on this class doing assignments or reading.

Good Luck, and Welcome to CSci 4707!
Shashi Shekhar