Authorised by Academic Registrar, April 1996
Objectives At the completion of this subject students should understand and be able to use a third-generation programming language to access a relational database; understand query optimisation and its impact on programming; understand the database management systems recovery, concurrency, security and transaction management mechanisms; and have the skills and knowledge to develop a physical database design.
Synopsis Embedding SQL in a host language; SQLCA - functions and values; implicit and explicit error handling; programming with cursors; physical database design; logical access maps; transaction maps; trade-offs involved in designing for performance versus design for flexibility; query optimisation; internal forms, query trees, access path selection; heuristics versus systematic optimisation; database integrity mechanisms; recovery mechanisms and theory, concurrency mechanisms and theory; security mechanisms; distributed database management systems; problems of achieving distribution, current distributed systems; database trends and state-of-the-art data models; database research areas; object-oriented databases.
Assessment Examination (2 hours): 50% + Practical work: 50%