Instructor: David Yang (Science South 450, david.yang@csueastbay.edu)
Time: Mondays, Wednesdays 4:00-5:50 PM
Location: Science South 213 

Blackboard will be used for submission of assignments and posting of course material, while email to the class will go to your school email account.

Text:
Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan, Database Systems Concepts, 5th ed., McGraw-Hill, 2005, ISBN-13: 978-0072958867 is the (expensive) text. However, any text that goes through databases in the same conceptual way should be fine. This includes older editions of the text, Date's text, Ullman's text, and many others. Some of the lecture notes were developed from the Elmasri and Navathe text. A former colleague really disliked this book, but it does have, in my opinion, an excellent procedure for converting an entity-relationship model into a relational database.

Goals:

• to develop an understanding of the concepts and techniques of of designing the organization of data with an emphasis on supporting data consistency. Databases are pretty easy to create, but if designed in an ad hoc manner, can easily allow inconsistent data or fail to support representing actual data or relationships between data.
• to model data organization using the entity-relationship model and display the model with an entity-relationship diagram
• to check and improve the model using normalization
• to practice these concepts and techniques using a relational database
• to learn how to use SQL to create, modify and, most popularly, query a relational database

Additional Topics:

• Indexes
• Accessing a database -- ODBC/JDBC
• Introductory query optimization
• XML
• If there is time, concurrency control and recovery

Calculation of your grade: 
In-class assignments 10%
Homework 20%
Project 20%
Midterm 20% each
The comprehensive final exam will count for 30%.

[grading note: Your exams must average (using the relative weights above) out to a C- or better in order to get at least a C- in the course.]

Final grades will be given according to the following scale:

93-100 A, 90-92 A-, 87-89 B+, 83-86 B, 80-82 B-, 77-79 C+, 73-76 C, 70-72 C-,67-69 D+, 60-66 D, 0-59 F 

Attendance:
Remember that standard policy dictates that students who do not attend can be removed in favor of students on the waiting list who do show up. Also, note that you need to be in class to do the in-class assignments and to take the exams.

Academic Honesty: This course will follow the University's standard policy on academic dishonesty. In particular, note that regardless of whether you copy work from another student or allow another student to copy your work on an exam, you are both equally guilty and equally penalized. Copying text/files off the internet without properly giving credit is also cheating. Any cheating on an exam results in an F for the course. Cheating twice also results in an automatic F. All instances of cheating will be reported to the Dean's office.

Remember that the University may inflict further penalties than listed here under the provisions of the published Academic Dishonesty Policy. 

Office Hours: My office is in room 450 of the South Science Building. My tentative schedule for office hours is: 

• MW 2-3:45PM

I will also be available at other times. You can make an appointment, though stopping by to see if I'm around is fine. It is better to ask questions before the exams.