Database Systems

Database Systems, photo: Gerd Altmann

Course ID:

ECO_424

Semester:

8th

Year of Study:

4th Year

Category:

Economics Elective

For Erasmus Students:

No

eclass URL

Learning Outcomes

The course aims at developing capabilities for the use of database systems as data design and data management tools. After successfully completing the course, students will be able to:

Understand the role and importance of databases in data management issues and in real life applications
Define the concept of the database and the Database Management System (DBMS)
Describe the desired characteristics of data
Utilize the Entity-Relationship and Extended Entity-Relationship models for the design of conceptual data models based on the description of microcosms
Describe the Relational database model and Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS)
Design relational databases based on the conceptual design of microcosms using the relational database model
Employ the concepts and operators that are supported by the SQL language for defining and manipulating data
Define the data using the SQL language
Retrieve data using the SQL language
Use the RBDMS of MS Access and MySQL to design and implement databases
Evaluate the design of databases

Course Contents

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.

Teaching Activities

Lectures (3 hours per week) and Laboratory Exercises (1 hour per week)

Teaching Organization

*Activity*	*Semester workload*
Lectures	3*13=39 hours
Lab exercises	1*13=13 hours
Team Project	64 hours
Individual quizzes, assignments and Self-study	34 hours
Total number of hours for the Course (25 hours of work-load per ECTS credit)	150 hours (total student work-load)

Assessment

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

Evaluation criteria are available to students at eclass here.

Use of ICT

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