Learning Outcomes

Understand how to succeed in ICS 321

• You understand the goals, structures, and procedures for learning in ICS 321.
• Your computer and its software is adequate to support the experiences you will have in this course.

Referencing modules: Introduction

Understand how to virtualization works

You understand

• what is virtualization
• how virtualization works
• what is a hypervisor
• what are virtual machines
• what are containers and images
• what is the difference between VMs and containers

You are able to

• install Docker
• create and use docker containers
• create docker images
• map ports between host and containers

Referencing modules: Virtualization

Understand what is a database system

• You understand what is a DBMS and what it provides
• You know when to use files and when to use a DBMS
• You understand how data can be encoded and stored in files.
• You can write a program to query large CSV files

Referencing modules: Worlds of Database Systems

Understand the relational model of data

• You understand what is the relational model
• You can conceptualize data using the relational model.
• You understand what basic relational algebra operators under set semantics.
• You can express queries using relational algebra.
• You can create tables using SQL DDL
• You understand integrity constraints
• You can specify primary key and foreign key constraints in CREATE TABLE statements

Referencing modules: The relational model of data

Understand query languages for databases

• You understand the difference between different types of query languages
• You understand set semantics and bag semantics
• You understand relational algebra operators including extended operators under both set and bag semantics
• You understand datalog
• You can express queries using both relational algebra and datalog

Referencing modules: Algebraic and logical query languages

Be proficient in SQL

• You can write single block SQL queries.
• You can compose SQL queries using set (and bag) operators.
• You can write SQL queries with correlated subqueries.
• You can write SQL aggregation queries involving GROUP BY and HAVING clauses.
• You can translate a query in English to SQL.

Referencing modules: SQL

Be able to write a program that interacts with a DBMS server

• You understand client-server computing in the context of DBMSs
• You understand how a host programming language environment interacts with the SQL environment
• You are proficient in writing Java programs that interacts with a DBMS server via the JDBC API.

Referencing modules: SQL in a server environment

Structure Data using Data Models

• You are able to conceptualize data using different data models
• You are able to use data modeling tools like Entity-Relationship Diagrams.
• You are able to translate data models into relational table schema (DDLs)

Referencing modules: High-level database models

Understand Data Normalization

• You understand functional dependencies and their relationship to keys
• You understand BCNF and 3NF
• You can find keys given a set of functional dependencies
• You can identify tables that are not normalized
• You can decompose unnormalized tables into BCNF and/or 3NF compliant tables.

Referencing modules: Design theory for relational databases

Understand constraints, views, triggers, and indexes in Databases

• You understand what constraints are for and how to use them.
• You understand what views are for and how to use them.
• You understand what triggers are for and how to use them.
• You understand what indexes are for and how to use them.
• You know how to decide what indexes to create for a given workload.

Referencing modules: Constraints, triggers, view, indexes

Understand basic transaction processing concepts

• You understand transactions and their properties (ACID)
• You understand the anomalies that occur without ACID
• You understand the locking protocols used to ensure Isolation
• You understand the logging techniques used to ensure Atomicity and Durability
• You understand Recovery techniques used to recover from crashes

Referencing modules: Transaction processing

Understand how data is stored and indexed in a DBMS

• You understand storage media and their basic properties
• You understand how data is stored using storage media in a DBMS
• You understand how different indexing techniques work
• You understand why and how data needs to be indexed
• You can analyze the performance of different storage and indexing strategies

Referencing modules: Storage and indexing

Understand query processing in DBMSs

• You understand how queries are processed, optimized and evaluated in a DBMS.
• You understand what is a query execution plan
• You understand how query execution plans are transformed/re-written.
• You understand how the cost of a query execution plan is estimated.

Referencing modules: Query processing

Understand how to store & query semi-structured data

• You understand what is a semi-structured data model and why it is useful
• You understand how semi-structured data can be stored
• You understand how to query semi-structured data

Referencing modules: Semi-structured data and XML

Create a DBMS-backed Web Application

• You are able understand the technical requirements of a particular informational problem
• You are able to design, develop and test a DBMS-backed web application to address a problem

Referencing modules: Project