Midterm 1 Review

Available at:
http://cs.winona.edu/faculty/nanderson/485/Midterm1Review.doc

Autoincrement

As some of you may know, Firebird does not offer autoincrement like MySQL. For Firebird you must use generators, which is Firebird-speak for sequences. I'll post some code later. Or if anyone else has some code to post, feel free.

Table named order

Just a piece of advice.
Im not sure how firebird deals with this but i am using mySQL with phpMyAdmin and if anyone is having trouble getting the itemID in the order table to references it in the menuItem table it is because ORDER is a reserved word. You are going to have to change the name of the table to something else.

HW #4 Discussion

I'm working on HW #4 and just want to see if I am on the right track.

The first part of the HW says to create schema's for

menuItem(id, name, description, cost);
order(id, ordernum, itemid);

Now, I'm taking this to mean create 2 tables named 'menuItem' and 'order' with the following columns and given primary keys 'id.'

Am I on the right track?

Other folks may use this thread for hw #4 discussion as well : )

Homework Frustration

Based on conversation with other students, I don't think I'm the only one who came out of the go_team and webwork database assignments feeling frustrated and bewildered. I'm curious to know what the learning objectives were for those projects because I'm pretty sure I missed them. I pretty much felt like I was blindly guessing at what someone else was doing. I really don't know what skills I may have developed during the process.

Any feedback from other students?

JDBC Example from Class

Available at:
http://cs.winona.edu/faculty/nanderson/485/JDBCGettingStarted.java

Homework 4

Homework 4 is available at:
http://cs.winona.edu/faculty/nanderson/485/Homework4.doc

Distributed Database Research

Hello, I need a partner. I was wondering if anyone would be interested in doing research into distributed databases.  I am interested in doing a brief overview of distributed databases. Then describing distributed databases with an emphasis on performance. Also a section on how to best create applications that can properly interface with distributed database systems, and how this application should be different due to the distribution of data.  A section on how distributed database design is effected by this distribution of data; namely the effects it has on normalization.  Since normalization in theory is good but in practical situations it may not be best. This section could describe denormalization of a database, what it is for, and when it is needed.    If anyone wants to be my partner just let me know!  If you have any other ideas let me know too, I am open to any modifications of these ideas.

Research Partner

Is anyone in Winona need Research Partner?? Please let me know. Thank you~!!

JDBC driver

Here is a link to the JDBC driver to use for mySQL. You have to extract it and put the .jar file in your folder ...java/jre1.6(whatever version you have)/lib/ext

Here is a really good tutorial on learning how to get started using JDBC for mySQL
http://www.developer.com/java/data/article.php/3417381

Research Partner Wanted

Is anyone in Winona interested in doing "Genomic Databases" for the project?

Research Presentation

Below is a link to information on the research presentation for this course. The first milestone (selecting a topic and writing a statement on your topic) is due in one week.

http://cs.winona.edu/faculty/nanderson/485/ResearchPresentation.doc

Firebird Multiset or Array???

Does anyone know how Firebird uses MULTISET or ARRAY datatypes? I can't find anything...

Homework 1

Have you sent back the homework 1 assignments? If so, what email did you send them to?

Rochester Room Change

Due to the less than ideal set up of the Rochester room, I requested a room change and was able to get ST114. This will be the new classroom in Rochester for the rest of the semester.

Some Links

General Info for Firebird:
http://www.firebirdsql.org/refdocs/langrefupd20.html

General Info for MySQL:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/index.html

Trigger Info for Firebird:
http://www.firebirdsql.org/refdocs/langrefupd20-create-trigger.html

Trigger Info for MySQL:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/trigger-syntax.html

Homework 3

Homework 3 is available at:
http://cs.winona.edu/faculty/nanderson/485/Homework3.doc

FlameRobin

Here is the link to FlameRobin's website.

Homework Submission

Due to the two campus issue, electronic-only submission will be fine for homework 2 and future homework assignments unless otherwise noted. Logistics make hard copy submissions difficult. Feel free to submit a hardcopy if you would like additional feedback on your homework.

Tomorrow's Class

Just a reminder that I will be in Rochester tomorrow for class. During office hours Winona students may reach me by posting here on the blog (recommended, especially if he question may apply to others), via email, or on the phone.

Homework 2 Modification

On homework 2, for question 1 you can skip the portion of the question that asks you to add the list of 4 rows to the table and identify whether they work correctly. It is not very interesting to do this without having some data previously in the table. We will discuss this more in class.

Questions?

The blog is very quiet. How is homework 2 going?

Some students have noticed that the syntax we used in class for examples does not match their DBMS. You will find this frequently, as different DBMS's have different syntax, especially as we get into some of the more complex features of database systems. You will have to tweak things to match your system.