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CSCI 2141:
Intro to Databases
Winter 2013
Dr. Kirstie Hawkey
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Who am I?
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Assistant Professor
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Undergrad Committee (advisor)
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Dalhousie, UBC, Dalhousie
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Research: Human-Computer Interaction, Usable Privacy &
Security, Visual Analytics, Mobile Graphics
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Room 225 Goldberg (also office in Mona Campbell)
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Office hours: typically Mon & Fri, 10:30-12:30
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hawkey@cs.dal.ca
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Course Website
 web.cs.dal.ca/~hawkey/2141
 Syllabus
 Resources
 Slides
 Assignments/Project
details
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Coursera
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https://class.coursera.org/db/class/index
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Current is self-study
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New course starting Jan 15th
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Taught by Stanford’s Dr. Jennifer Widom (of the text book
fame)
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Sign up
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I will assign videos from time to time
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Exercises, assignments, exams offer practice
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Nice mapping of how info is covered in the various text books
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… and that certificate if you want another piece of paper!
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What we will cover
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Database (DB) components
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DB design using entity-relationship (relational, object
oriented)
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SQL
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Transactional properties and techniques to support them
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Take a look at some of the emerging database trends
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Distributed databases, cloud computing, big data, semistructured data models, NoSQL
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Project: MySQL + web interface
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Security
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Security
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My philosophy
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Talking heads only go so far
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Need to think and try and explain and practice to truly
understand
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Assignments are primarily to help you learn, evaluation is
secondary
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Can do in groups (up to 3 people)
Marked for completeness (50%) and correctness (50%) for a subset
of questions
Quick turnaround of answers
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Project will give you some real world experience implementing
DB concepts
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Tests will ask you to explain and apply the concepts learned
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Pop quizzes let me see how you are doing, encourage you to keep up
We will go over the answers in the class after the quiz
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Why databases? Why this course?
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Required course? (BCS, Binf, BSc)
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Prerequisite for: 3151 Web Intelligence, 3172 Web Centric
Computing, 3190 Community Outreach, 4140 Advanced DB
Systems, Co-op
Career path?
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Career beacon
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Hidden career path…
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We are all end users
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For the next class
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Sign up for the db class on coursera
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Watch the intro video
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Familiarize yourself with the resources
Choose a secondary information source
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Textbook, website (share with me!), coursera ….
Come prepared with tales of poor DB design
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Home depot
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Others?