Index

This site contains a collection of material to aid the teaching and research of databases. In particular, it contains some sample datasets in a variety of formats, and some tools which allow you to import those datasets into a relational database. It also contains some notes of using Java's JDBC to access relational databases.

The tabs to the left allow you to select the following areas:

The DBLibrary tab outlines the functionality of a set of Java programs which I provide to assist in creating relational databases from sources of data that either I provide, or are available from other sites.
The Datasets tab contains a collection of sample datasets, in flat file format, XML, or as SQL commands.
The JDBC tab contains links to help you use JDBC in you applications.
The Research Link tab contains links to sites on database research related to the field of data modelling and integration.

To use any of the tools on this site or to access databases via JDBC from your own Java application, you will in need:

A database on a relational database server (RDBMS), with a username and password. Several of the datasets are available for use within the department for read-only access via a special guest account, but to create new databases you will need your own database and login details.
The JDBC driver for the RDBMS you are using. For the examples it is assumed that this is a single package (but sometimes a JDBC driver comes in more that one jar file).

For example, to run a DBLibrary program db.lib.prog in a bash shell, you could execute once
```
export CLASSPATH=dblibrary.jar:pgjdbc2.jar:$CLASSPATH
```
to configure your environment, and then run (any number of times) the command
```
java db.lib.prog
```

The following table summarises the parameters you must collect before using DBLibrary or using JDBC from your own application.

Parameters required for running DBLibrary and using JDBC
parameter	description	example
myserver	The hostname on which the database server is running	db.doc.ic.ac.uk
mydatabase	The name of the database in which information is to be stored	films
mydriverjar	The file name of the JDBC driver for the database	pgjdbc2.jar
mydriver	The Java class name of the JDBC driver for the database (which should be present in the listing produced by `jar -tf mydriver.jar`)	org.postgresql.Driver
myurl	A URL for the database you wish to connect to, in a format that varies according to the value of mydriverjar	jdbc:postgresql://db.doc.ic.ac.uk/films
myusername	The login name you have for the database server (which might not be the same as your login name for the host on which the server runs)	lab
mypassword	The password you have for the database server (which might not be the same as your password for the host on which the server runs)	lab