CO572 Advanced Databases: Course Part B Home Page 2018-19 Session

General Information about Part B of the Course

The second part of the course will be taught by Peter McBrien, and comprise of four hours per week of combined lectures and tutorials. Lectures for the course will run in weeks 6-9. The exam for the course will be held in week 11 of the same term.

The syllabus and book list are held in DSS and on the departmental course page

To gain access to Panopto Lecture Recordings, Piazza Discussion Forums, and to receive course emails, please register at least to level 2 for this course.

Lecture Slides

The slides are placed here at the time of the lecture. Slides with grey links are provisional versions of the slides. Note that the course content is what is presented verbally during the lectures: you are expected to attend all lectures. Worksheets will be provided during lectures, and answers to those worksheets provided also during lectures.

  1. Overview of Distributed Databases
  2. Big Data and Pig Latin
  3. Distributed Query Processing Optimisation
  4. Concurrency Control
  5. Temporal Databases

Example Databases

The course has a practical flavour, and several example databases will be used through the course. Four of these databases are made available for running example queries on both SQL Server and Postgres:

Further examples to download into your own database are found at databases tools and data mini site.

Examples hosted on a Microsoft SQL Sever 2008 DBMS

To connect to the databases hosted on SQL Server, issue commands in the following form on a CSG Linux machine (and using password 'lab'):

sqsh -S sqlserver -D bank_branch -U lab

Once connected, queries may be entered, terminated by \go. Help on the environment may be found using \help.

The sqshrc file may be copied as .sqshrc in your home directory, and altered to change the default behaviour of sqsh. This file should by default be also present as /etc/sqshrc on CSG Linux machines, but may be absent from recent Ubuntu installations.

Note that this version of SQL Server does not support the various three valued logic tests IF UNKNOWN, IF NOT FALSE, etc. It has been set to use ANSI handling of NULL equality tests.

Examples hosted on a Postgres DBMS

To connect to the databases hosted on Postgres, issue commands in the following form on a CSG Linux machine (and using password 'lab'):

psql -h db -U lab -d bank_branch -W

Once connected, queries may be entered, terminated with a semicolon. Online help may be accessed with \help, and \exit used to exit the psql tool.

Note that this version of Postgres does not support CUBE or ROLLUP.

Previous Course Home Pages

2017-18