There will be no lecture on Friday 11 Oct. Instead, I
am setting you an extra unassessed homework exercise to
do.
This is now on the Exercises page (see below).
Click here for lecture slides.
Some lecture material, including material to be used in assessed work, may be of a nature that is difficult to replicate readily by looking at textbooks, etc. Also, I may say or use the whiteboard to write things that won't be available electronically. Attendance at lectures is therefore irreplaceable as well as obligatory.
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.
For the practical work you will be using a database management system called PostgreSQL (see below), which is centred on one of many versions of Structured Query Language or SQL.
The (unassessed) exercises that will be assigned before Week 3 will be conceptual (i.e., won't involve practical work using SQL). This is why there is no practical session until Week 3.
The remaining exercises during the term will be a varying mix of conceptual work and practical work using SQL. You are encouraged to do the practical work as far as possible during the scheduled practical sessions in Weeks 3 to 11.
There is ONE CLASS TEST. also worth 10% of module mark. It will be in week 8 of the term, during the Friday lecture period. The Class Test will not involve practical work but may nevertheless involve constructing small segments of SQL code by hand.
The remaining 80% of the module mark will come from the Examination. This will largely involve tasks similar to those in the Exercises. There may ALSO be other sorts of question, e.g. asking for explanations of concepts and issues, and questions asking you to integrate material in creative ways.
Tackling the exercises, unassessed and assessed, will help you enormously with the Class Test and the Examination. I would not expect someone to be able to get a good mark on, or even pass, the test or examination if they have not tried to do the exercises.
The module will draw mainly from Chapters 1 to 9, but the rest of the book also provides an excellent resource for additional learning of your own.
I have used previous editions of the book in the past (NB: the authors have usually been Rob and Coronel, not Coronel, Morris and Rob as above). Those earlier editions are still good sources for most of the material in the module, though the positions of pieces of material may differ.
There is some documentation
on getting started.
Use the instructions in the "Getting Started" part.
In particular, you will at some point need to create an account on
the School's PostgreSQL server, via those instructions.
The LECTURES will mostly NOT give you instruction
about the details of SQL or how to use it. Experience shows that
students can learn SQL from the ADDITIONAL NOTES mentioned above and the
textbook, 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 directly helpful to you in writing SQL. Indeed, in order
to write good SQL and design good databases, and appreciate the faults
in bad ones, you need the non-SQL content of the module!
The textbook explains SQL in general in considerable detail, though some features differ slightly from the features of PostgreSQL.
In addition, you may wish to look at the REFERENCE MANUAL However, you aren't expected to be familiar with the wealth of detail in the manual.
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".
As the module proceeds, you'll get the following sorts of feedback on your work and development:
You can collaborate more freely on UNASSESSED homework exercises. But please bear in mind the main principle behind the exercises, both assessed and unassessed: it's important for YOUR sake that YOU get the practice of DOING the work and THINKING about the module material.
I encourage you to come to my OFFICE HOUR (which is specified on my timetable) to ask questions or make comments (during any of Terms 1, 2 and Term 3). If you cannot manage that time for some important reason, please contact me to arrange an appointment.
Some or all of them will be on hand to help you in Thursday practical sessions, which start in Week 3 of the term. You can go to see them in their office hours. You can email them 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.
Some lectures will be partly or wholly on LO5 topics. However, Year-in-CS students will be expected to come to these lectures in full, as the material will proceed from scratch (there will be no assumption of prior knowledge) and should make some sense to all students. Also, in these lectures I may make occasional additional comments that are not on LO5.
Unassessed exercise sets will contain work on the above topic. Year-in-CS students as well as Fundamentals students can tackle it if they wish. If assessed work items (Class Test, Week 9-11 Exercises, or Examination) contain questions on LO5 stuff, then these questions will be optional for Year-in-CS students even when compulsory for Master's students.
Last mod 7oct13, 3:05p