Exam Syllabus

 This exam will no longer cover spatial database material.

Related Courses

 

  •    CS 503 Scientific Database Techniques
  •    CS 514 Database Theory and Implementation

References

  •    Oracle 10g Programming, by Sunderraman, Addison-Wesley 2007 (or the 11g update)
  •    Database Management Systems, by Ramakrishnan and Gehrke, McGraw-Hill, 2007, or An Intro to Database Systems, by C.J. Date, 8’th Ed., Addison-Wesley , 2004

Topics

Note: for the first level, either cs503 or cs514 should provide an adequate grounding for the exam.
The topical syllabus should clarify. The exam covers ‘standard’ SQL, and Oracle or MySQL are
sample implementations. The exam will contain some topics common to CS503 and CS514, while
for other parts of the exam, a choice between 503 and 514 topics may be given.

CS514 level

 

  1. Database systems terminology, e.g. integrity, concurrency, persistence.   Relational database models: relational algebra and relational calculus. Database levels: internal, conceptual, external
  2. Basic SQL: including DDL, DML, DCL, types of joins (equi, self, outer, nonequi). Some Oracle specific issues, e.g.Oracle sqlplus interpreter
  3. ‘Advanced’ topics, like subselects, group by, creation of constraints, creation of views, Oracle supplied functions like TO_CHAR, NVL, INSTR, etc.
  4. Embedded SQL using PL/SQL including anonymous blocks, stored functions and procedures, packages, cursors and exceptions
  5. Embedded SQL using jdbc and appropriate drivers to communicate to a dbms, specifically Oracle
  6. Database design, including ER model, participation constraints, key constraints
  7. Implementation of ER in RDBMS
  8. Normalization, including 1NF, 2NF, 3NF and BCNF
  9. Triggers