I encourage you to come to my office hour (see my timetable) to ask questions or make comments (during Term 2 and Term 3). If you cannot manage that time for some important reason, please contact me to arrange an appointment.
Some demonstrators will be on hand to help you in the Thursday practical sessions, and you can email the demonstrators at other times with questions about module material, incl. exercises. They may choose to define particular times of the week at which they will reply to such messages, depending on how many messages there turn out to be.
If you wish to email a demonstrator, please give preference to the MSc students above (for particular administrative reasons I won't bore you with) unless you have a specific motivation to do otherwise (e.g., you've previously talked to Fubiao or Hana about something and you want to pursue it, or you just found the person particularly helpful).
click here for main slides so far
You won't need other parts of the book for this module but they're all good stuff and I encourage you to look at them at some stage.
See a section below for general comments about the exercises in this module.
But remember that previous year's exercises were set weekly, not fortnightly, although the SQL stuff has always started in Week 3.
Previous years' assessed exercises are different from this year's, but there will be enough similarity for them to provide useful hints as to how to proceed with many of this year's.
Caution: Do NOT use previous years' handouts as replacements for this year's. I've been making gradual improvements and additions, with substantial improvements in some places this year.
You are encouraged to ask questions and instigate discussion during lectures. Because of this, I make no guarantees about what topics I'm going to cover in any particular lecture.
The SLIDES that I will be presenting in lectures will generally be available from this webpage. However, in lectures I may write down things that won't be available electronically. (When these things are written on overhead transparencies I will, if appropriate, make copies available afterwards via the School Library.)
I will mostly not be giving you instruction about the details of SQL or how to use it in lectures. Apart from the fact that there's a lot else to cover in lectures, experience shows that students can learn SQL from the Additional Notes mentioned below, combined with one-to-one help from demonstrators when needed. This allows you to go at your own pace and to try things out as you go along.
However, the conceptual, non-SQL material in lectures will often be very directly helpful to you in writing SQL.
When there are NO computing exercises to be done, one or more demonstrators will be present in the practical session, which will be in room B07 in the Mechanical Engineering building and will last for ONE HOUR only. The hour will consist of discussion (based on your questions about the exercises and/or questions/comments to you from the demonstrators).
When there ARE computing exercises to be done, the practical sessions will (mainly) be in the Upper Ground floor lab (UG04) in the CS building. I will also arrange for several demonstrators to be available in the lab during the sessions, so that you can get help.
Room LG52 in the Learning Centre will also be available to you for study purposes during the full practical session each Thursday. (NB: The room only accommodates about 10 people. I may need to cancel it at some point.)
I have used previous editions of the book in the past. These are still good sources for most of the material in the module.
In addition, you are expected to learn any additional information provided in EXERCISES.
The continuously assessed work (exercises) and the examination may draw
from compulsory reading material lying within the above items or others,
even when the specific topics in the material are not covered in
lectures.
The CA work consists of exercises that are set roughly every two weeks starting in week 3. The exercise sets will normally be set on Wednesdays. They will typically contain a mix of theoretical exercises and hands-on computing exercises.
There will be additional, UNassessed, exercises that will be set in Week 1. These will be non-technical (and not involve computer use). They will get you thinking in the right way.
You are encouraged to do the work as far as possible during the scheduled practical sessions.
Tackling the exercises will also help you enormously with the examination. I would not expect someone to be able to get a good mark on, or even pass, the examination if they have not tried to do the exercises.
IGNORE the following information as it is unfortunately useless: the previous examinations are apparently no longer visible on the University site because the module name has changed.
Please see the University's site for previous papers.
NOTE: Before 2009/10 the modules had different names: Fundamentals of CS 2: Databases(for Master's students) and Computer Science Fundamentals 2: Databases (for ICY students). (These names applied from 2005/06.) Use these names, but WITHOUT the "Databases" parts, when looking for previous exam papers. The modules were actually halves of bigger modules that also covered Software Engineering, so for my purposes you should only look at the Databases portion of each paper, namely Section C.
I would advise you against looking at examinations for the (yet differently named) corresponding module from before 2005/06, as my coverage of topics is different from that of the lecturer who was teaching the material then.
Please bear in mind that it's important that YOU get the practice of DOING the work. The CA work is provided to you mainly for purposes of your learning, not as a way of depriving you of marks!
In particular, you will at some point need to create an account on the School's PostgreSQL server, via those instructions.
Despite all this it is certainly a good idea to remember that the QL part does ultimately derive from the phrase "query language." There are various other query-language names of form xy...zQL in Computer Science.
Also note that because of the origin in the name "SEQUEL" some people pronounce the name "SQL" as if it were the English word "sequel".
Last mod 24mar10, 11:36am