CSSE 533 –
Database Systems
Week 1, Day 1
Steve Chenoweth
CSSE Dept
We’ll look at…

Your goals for the course

Course syllabus

Course schedule

Books

Data mining material

What we’ll do at meetings

What environment we’ll use (Mike’s)

Initial goals for PostgreSQL

What we’ll do at our second meeting
2
Your goals for the course
Suggestions (see also next page):
 Learning about the two database systems

PostgreSQL

MongoDB
 How these relate to your work
 Learning about data mining
 How these topics all relate to other projects you
are doing / want to do
 Project scope you’d consider doing
3
What you said (Jan 20 emails)
Jon:

The areas that interest me with respect to Database Structures are as follows;

Database Design as it relates to Big Data and Machine Learning


Are these relational or flat mutually exclusive tables?

What are the suggested high performing designs with respect to the domain of machine
learning and big data
PL / SQL | Stored Procedures


I did some PL/SQL in college but would like to see what the latest trend is with regard to
stored procedures and the like for this space.
That’s all I can think of at the moment but didn’t want it to escape my head.
Mike:

I’m on board with learning more about stored procedures. I’m very familiar with a
lot of the details surrounding them, but I really only wrote them myself way back as
an undergrad. So that sounds like a fun itch to scratch.

I suppose that, at the moment, I don’t have anything in particular that I’d like to
learn about just yet. I’ll speak up if anything comes to me.
4
A few quick questions
 What is Interactive Intelligence’s current use
of both these databases?
 How are they (you) doing data mining now?
 Can you latch onto whatever the internal
user groups are for these?
 Can you get them interested in whatever
project you would like to do?
5
Course syllabus
 Main goal – make it a chance to learn moe
about database systems you care about
 And learn about using them for data mining
 Left open – what the assignments would be,
and when due
 Happy to take suggestions
 Let’s look it over
6
Course schedule
 I divided into –
 Week 1 – figure out what we want to do
 PostgreSQL – four weeks
 MongoDB – four weeks
 Data mining embedded in each of these
 Week 10 – Project demos & lessons learned
7
Books
 Both are handy dandy O’Reilly’s
 Both are useful for practitioners who have a
larger role, like needing to do some systems
admin work.
 Both assume you already know basic stuff
like SQL.
 We could either:
 Have reading assignments? Or,
 Just use them as references?
8
Data mining material
 There’s lots all over the Internet.
 Basically, it’s a combination of:
 The Machine Learning stuff we did last term,
and
 Using database systems like these two, to get
the data, and
 If you have really huge data, using tools like
Hadoop to run algorithms on many machines
at once.
9
What we’ll do at
meetings
 Talk about the DBMS of interest.
 Talk about how it can do data mining.
 See demos of things you want to show.
 Discuss issues and progress on projects.
 What we’ll do each week – see next slide 
10
What we’ll do at
meetings, cntd

What we’ll do each week –

For each DBMS, I divided the 4 weeks into these
parts:

Learning to use it –


Working on it with real data


See if you could get data you like to be formatted for
something you want to do.
Applying it to data mining


Try things and ask questions and make plans
Try applying some program or query to it.
Applying it to your project

Show how you could actually get something of value.
11
What environment we’ll
use (Mike’s)
 Maybe tonight and/or Thursday are an intro
for the PostgreSQL installation?
 Plus see what happens when we all try to
use it at the same time!?
 Other considerations?
12
Initial goals for
PostgreSQL
 Your goals for using this DB
 What’s special about it, as you see this
 (We’ll talk next week about what’s special
about it as the world sees it.)
 Thursday – How it might fit with your project?
 Other learning goals for it?
13
What we’ll do at our
second meeting
 More details about your likely project.
 Where it stands – e.g.,
 Do you have data ready to try loading into
some schema on either DB?
 What in particular might be doable as an
exercise in using PostgreSQL?
 More initial demos?
14