University of Alberta - Department of Computing Science

CMPUT 391: Database Management Systems
Winter 2004

CMPUT 391: Database Management Systems
Instructor: Osmar R. Zaiane (zaiane@cs.ualberta.ca)
Course Home Page: http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~zaiane/courses/cmput391/

OBJECTIVE/DESCRIPTION:

This is a second course in our two-course serial on the database management systems. The first course (CMPUT291) introduces the basic concepts and elements of file and database systems with enphasis on the entity-relationship model and SQL query language. The second course covers advanced aspects of database management systems including concurrency control, query optimization, security issues, data mining, etc.
By the end of the course, students are expected to understand the basic concepts in all these advanced database topics, as well as get some practical hands-on experience with ORACLE through a small term project to design and implement a web-based database application.

TOPICS:

The course will cover the following topics:
  1. Physical Database Design (Normilization and design refinement)
  2. Query processing and optimization
  3. Transaction Processing (Concurrency control, Database recovery, ...)
  4. Querying XML repositories
  5. Object-Oriented databases and Spatial Databases
  6. Information retrieval
  7. Data warehousing
  8. Data mining
  9. Parallel and Distributed databases
The course will also have a series of lab tutorials on JDBC, Servlets, JSP, Triggers, XML, Database security, Locking isolation levels, etc.

GRADING:

Assignments 20% (5 X 4%), Lab Exercises 5% (5 X 1%), Project 25%, Midterm exam (20%), Final Exam 30%.

Final grades will be assigned in a way that the grade histogram approximates (as long as it is feasible) a normal (bell-shaped) curve.

No re-examination except as per regulation. All appeals to the marks, except to that of the final exam, must be registered with the instructor or TAs before the scheduled final examination starts.

TEXTBOOKS and REFERENCES: P.M. Lewis, A. Bernstein and M. Kifer, Databases and Transaction Processing, Addison-Wesley, 2002, ISBN: 0-201-70872-8.

additional references:

  • R. Ramakrishnan and J. Gehrke, Database Management Systems, 3rd Edition, McGraw-Hill, 2002, ISBN: 0-07-232206-3.
  • R. Elmasri and S. Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, 4th Edition, Addison-Wesley, 2003, ISBN: 0-321-12226-7. (The 3rd Edition, ISBN 0-8053-1755-4, is also acceptable).
    Distributed: December 1, 2003 (Osmar R. Zaiane) [last update Dec. 29, 2003]