After successfully completing the course, students will be able to:
Knowledge:

• Understand the role and importance of databases in data management issues and in real life applications
• Define the notion of database and Database Management System (DBMS)
• Describe the desired characteristics of data
• Describe conceptual data models and especially the EntityRelationship and Extended Entity-Relationship models
• Describe the Relational database model and the Relational Database Management Systems
• Describe the basic steps required to design databases
• Evaluate the design of databases
• Identify the concepts and operators that are supported by the SQL language for defining and manipulating data

Skills

• Design conceptual models based on the description of microcosms
• Design relational databases based on the conceptual design of microcosms
• Define the data using the SQL language
• Retrieve data using the SQL language
• Use the RBDMSs MS Access and MySQL to design and implement databases

Definition of database and Database Management System (DBMS), Comparing DBMSs to filesystems of Operating Systems, Advantages of DBMSs, Architecture of DBMSs and levels of abstraction, Data models, Methodology of database design and implementation, The Entity-Relationship conceptual model (Entities, Relationships, Constraints), The Extended Entity Relationship conceptual model (Generalization, Specialization and related constraints), The relational model (relation, relation schema, instances/tuples, relational database schema, Domain constraints, Key constraints, Foreign key constraints, General purpose constraints), Logical database design using the relational model, Relational Algebra, The SQL language, The DDL subset of SQL, The DML subset of SQL, Queries in SQL.

Lectures (2 hours per week) and Laboratory Exercises (2 hours per week)

1. One Team Project on designing and implementing a database using a RDBMS: 30%
2. Final exam: 70%

• Slides and notes to support lectures
• Software tools for demonstration and practical application purposes:
  • Diagram editor tools for the design of Entity-Relationship diagrams (MS Vision, Open source DIA, etc.)
  • RDBMS tools for the implementation of database systems (MS Access, OpenOffice base, etc.)
• Use of the E-Learning platform eclass in order to:

• • Organize the course material (slides, notes, examples, code snippets etc)
  • Perform weekly online quizzes to evaluate the understanding of the related course material
  • Hand in homeworks
  • Communicate with the students and the class