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What is Databases 1 about?
Database design / modeling:
- analyzing properties of a database
- improving / optimizing database schemes
Data manipulation:
- how to translate a question from natural language to a formal query language
- how to read and understand queries
Notes:
The course “Databases 1” consists of two parts: one about database design or data modeling, and another about data manipulation. In order to give you enough time to become really familiar with both parts we will have two parallel tracks during this course. Each week we will study database design for half of the time and data manipulation for the other half of the time.
In the part about database design we study properties of a database that may have an influence on how we want to structure the data. A property like “the VCR can record only one program at a time” may influence how we structure the timer information in the VCR database. But also when it does not influence the structure we still need to verify that programs do not overlap so as to warn the user about this problem.
This part is fairly theoretical. We are going to learn how to prove properties of a database. You can only learn this by doing and by doing a lot of it. If you do not invest enough time in acquiring this skill you will fail the exam.
In the part about data manipulation we learn how to retrieve information from a database. We often know what we want to ask the database, but we know it in natural language (English or Dutch) and we need to translate the question to a formal query language understood by the database system. Learning to “speak” these query languages fluently can only be done through lots and lots of exercises. This will take a lot of time and effort, and if you do not invest enough time and effort into this course you will fail the exam.
We not only need to learn to ask questions to a database, we also need to be able to read the query languages so that we can understand queries that have been asked by someone else.