Contents

B561: Advanced Database Concepts

Fall 2008

Announcements


Announcements will be posted here. Please check this page frequently to ensure you don't miss anything.

  • The solution to the exam 2 is here
  • Today's lecture (November 20) will be replaced by a reading assignment from the following online available book:
    Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems Bernstein, Hadzilacos, Goodman. You can find this book at
    The book
    The reading assignment is to read Chapter 1. This chapter gives an overview of recovery and concurrency control in database systems.
    Instead of using our textbook, we will be using the Bernstein et.al. book to cover the Transaction Management Component of the B561 course. This book is considered THE standard reference on this topic.
    Next Tuesday, I will go over the material in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.y
  • Exam2 topics:
    Sections:
    8.1-8.3
    9.1
    10.1-10.6
    11.1-11.2
    12.3
    14.1-14.5 (will be covered tomorrow)
    15.1
    15.3
  • The office hours of Prof. Van Gucht are changed to Monday and Friday 8:00 - 9:00am.
  • The date of the second exam is 11/6/2008 (in class, open book/note).
    The time of the final exam is from 7:15pm to 9:15pm on 12/16/2008.
    Please check the fianl exam schedule

  • The exam on Tuesday covers the ER model. The other stuff(end up to relational calculus) will be covered on Thursday.
  • A few changes are added to the last question of the assignment3. Please check the assignment page.
  • An important correction of last class. And please check the expression which is equivalent to the one using dom.

  • Relational Algebra as Constraints
  • I gave hints to last two subquestions of question one. Also I corrected the question 6. You can download the assignment2 to see them.
    Some of you want to review how to use algebra to present constraints, so I will post a brief summary of it tomorrow morning.

  • Dear students, I need to cancel my 1:00pm-2:00pm office hrs today (September 18). However, I will hold my office hrs tomorrow from 9:00am to 10:30am.
    Sorry for the inconvenience, Dirk

  • The question 6 in the assignment 2 has a mistake. I corrected it here.

  • During today's lecture (September 16), I made an error in the specification for the constraint ``The set of courses taken by students who received an `A' grade in one of these courses contains the set of courses taken by students who never received an 'A' grade in at least one of these courses.'' Here is the correction.
    Incidentally, if I make a mistake during lecture, please let me know and I will use this announcements page to correct it. Dirk

  • The office hour of Prof. Van Gucht is changed from TR 1:30-2:30pm to 1:00-2:00pm.

  • Correction: In assignment1, the ER model of question 5 should include three key/weak key attributes, EmployeeID, DepartmentID and Child_Name.
  • I strongly encourage you the lecture slides for Chapter 4 to class. During the next several class lectures, I will cover that material. -Dirk.
  • I recommend that you consult the Lecture slides for all chapters in Adobe PDF and in postscript format.These can be found here. Some of the class lectures will follow these lecture slides.I propose that you bring the lecture slides and augment them with your own notes.
  • The first exam is scheduled as an in-class, open-book/notes/assignments exam for October 2. The material you will be examined on consists of that covered in Chapters 1 through 5.
  • The text book can be found in the main library. Please check the IUCat
  • The link to the supporting material is added under Textbook
  • 08-28-08 The class homepage is up. Please report any problems to Mo.