The Home Page of the
Graduate Database Course COSC 6340
Spring 2001

Basic Course Information COSC 6340

Instructor: Dr. Christoph F. Eick
Office: 589 PGH
Office hours: WE 2-3 TH 4-5p

Teaching Assistant: Ying Lin
Email: linying@cs.uh.edu
Office: 366 PGH
Office Hours: MO 4-5p, TU 3:30-4:30p, WE 4-5p
Ying Ling's COSC 6340 homepage

Class meets: TU/TH 1-2:30p
Class room: 211 PGH
cancelled classes:

Course Materials

Required Text:

Raghu Ramakrishnan and Johannes Gehrke, Data Management Systems, Second Edition

McGraw Hill 1999, ISBN: 0-07-232206-3

Call number:

Link to Textbook Homepage

Recommended:

Jiawei Han and Micheline Kamber, Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

Morgan Kaufman Publishers, 2001, ISBN 1-55860-489-8

Link to Data Mining Book Home Page

Other books with relevant material:

Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Third Edition

Addison Wesley ISBN: 0-8053-1755-4

Link to Navathe's Book/Course Page

COSC 6340 News

The final exam is scheduled for Tuesday, May 8, 2001. We are in the process of finishing the grading of the midterm exam and the grades should be available no later than April 5, 2001. The exam will be discussed and returned to students in the April 17 class.

A initial draft of the group project has been posted; if your group hasn't done so, please send me an e-mail with the names and e-mail addressed of your group members. The group project is due on Monday, April 23, 4p (electronic submission).

Exam0 Solutions: Solution E/R Problem Exam0, a solution to all other problems can be found in Ying Lin's homepage. If you have questions conc. the grading of Exam0 talk to Dr. Eick during his office hours; if you have questions concerning the grading of the projects, graded homeworks, and the midterm exam, talk to Ying Lin during her office hours.

Tentative class schedule though Spring Break

Jan. 16-Feb. 8: Fast Review of Undergraduate Material
- Jan. 16: Introduction to COSC 6340
- Jan. 18: Entity-Relationship Data Model
- Jan. 23: Entity-Relationship
- Jan. 25: Relational Data Model
- Jan. 30: Mapping E/R to Relations
- Feb. 1: Files, B+-trees, and hashing (chapter 8, 9, 10)
- Feb. 6: Files, B+-trees, and hashing (chapter 8, 9, 10)
- Feb. 8: Relational Algebra and SQL (very brief!!)
Feb. 13: Exam0 (Undergraduate Material Review Exam)
Feb. 15: Implementation of Relational Operators (ch. 12)
Feb. 20: Leftovers + Implementation of Relational Operators (ch. 12)
Feb. 22/27/1: BCNF, 4F, Normalization and Functional Dependencies (ch. 15)
March 6/8: Query Optimization and Physical Database Design (ch. 13+16)
March 20: Introduction to KDD (ch. 24, chapter 1 Han/Kamber)
March 22: Midterm Exam
March 27: Data Warehouses and OLAP I (ch. 23(only sections 23.5 and 23.6); chapter 2 Han/Kamber pages 39-68, 79-83(2.4.2, 2.4.3), and 95-99)
March 29: Introduction to Oracles and PL/SQL (Ying Lin)
April 3: Data Warehouses and OLAP II
April 5: Association Rule Mining (ch. 6 Han/Kamber; Nguyen Survey Paper)
April 10: Association Rule Mining
April 12: Classification and Prediction (subset ch. 7 Han/Kamber pages 279-296 and section 7.7.1)
April 17: Internet Databases and XML (ch. 22)
April 19: TBDL
April 24: Object-Oriented Databases (chapter 12 ElMasri book)
April 26: Object-Oriented Databases

Prerequisites

The class prerequisites are COSC 3480 or equivalent (undergraduate database class) and MATH 3336. The first 4 weeks of the COSC 3480-lectures will review some undergraduate material, but the review will be quite fast pace and far from being complete. I decided not to drop the students that did not take COSC 3480 from the class, but rather to give the members of this group the opportunity to acquire the missing knowledge in the first 4 weeks of the semester. If you have neither taken an undergraduate database class, nor acquired the necessary knowledge in a different setting, you will have to work quite hard in the first 4 weeks of the semester.

Material Covered in COSC 6380

Students are assumed to be familiar with most of the material that is covered in chapters 1-5 and 7-11 of the required textbook that discuss material that is typically covered in undergraduate database courses, such as COSC 3480 in our undergraduate program. If you took a database class a long time ago, studying those chapters prior to January 31, 2001 is highly recommended.

The course is subdivided into six parts.

I: Basic Database Management Concepts --- The first part is a 4-week review of basic database concepts, techniques, and languages, and will pass quite quickly through the material of chapters 1-5 and 7-11 of the textbook.
II: Implementation of Relational Operators and Query Optimization --- Approximately 1.5 weeks have been allocated to this part that covers the chapters 12 and 13 of our textbook.
III: Relational Database Design --- Approximately 2 weeks have been allocated to the second part of the class that centers on database design. It covers the chapters 15 and 16 of our textbook.
IV: Introduction to KDD and Making Sense of Data --- Approximately 3 weeks have been allocated to the fourth part that will cover the chapters 23 and 24 of our textbook, chapters 1, 2, 6, and 7 of the Han/Kamber book centering on data warehouses, OLAP, and Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.
V: Object-oriented Databases, PL/SQL, Object-relational Database Systems, and SQL3 --- Approximately 1.5 weeks have been allocated to the fifth part of the course. This part will cover Chapter 12 of the ElMasri textbook, and will mostly use teaching material that will be taken from other sources.
VI: Intenet Databases and XML --- 1 week has been allocated for this topic that will cover chapters 22 of the textbook.

Elements of COSC 6340 in Spring 2001

Review Exam (Feb. 13) --- weight 15% (Review List for the Feb. 13 Exam)

Midterm Exam (March 22) --- weight 23% (Review List for Midterm Exam)

Final Exam (May 8) --- weight 32%

Database Design Project (Individual Project; due March 1) --- weight 7% (Specification Project 1 --- initial draft)

Oracle, PL/SQL Project (Group Project; due on April 23) --- weight 9%

2 graded homeworks --- weights 6% + 8% (Specification Graded Homework1 due on March 19, 2001 at 4p; Homework2 will be due on April 26) All weights are preliminary and subject to change.

Class Transparencies Spring 2001

I Basic Concepts of Database Management

Sham Navathe's database introduction (in Word)
The Entity Relationship Data Model
- Dr. Eick's 3 E/R Transparencies
- Ullman's E/R-Model Introduction (Part1, Part2 in Postscript Format).
- Designing E/R Diagrams
Raghu's Brief Introduction to the Relational Data Model and Mapping E/R to Relations
Disks, Files, Storage Structures and Index Structures
- Raghu's Discusssions conc. Secondary Storage (Powerpoint; not to be discussed in class but relevant for the Feb. 13 review exam!)
- Raghu's transparencies discussing file systems (only a few of those will be disussed in class).
- Raghu's/Dr. Eick's transparencies discussing Static Hashing, B+-trees and Extendible Hashing (some typos on transparencies 10, 11, 13, 14, and 15 have been corrected on Feb. 1, 4p).
Raghu's Relational Algebra Transparencies (will be partially be discussed in class).
More on the Relational Data Model and SQL
- Dr. Eick's Rel/SQL-transparencies (Postscript; to be used in lecture, if enough time)
- Jeff Ullman's SQL Intro. Part1 and SQL Intro. Part II, SQL Constraints, Triggers, and Assertions and PL/SQL Introduction (Postscript; useful for Project2)
- Raghu's Introduction to SQL (Powerpoint, will not be used in lecture but reviewing those will be very helpful for the Feb. 13 exam).

II Implementation of Relational Operators and Query Optimization

Implementation of Natural Joins and Implementation of Other Relational Algebra Operators
Cost Formulas for Different Join Implementations
Raghu's Introduction to Query Optimization
Hakan Jacobson (Oracle) on "Issues in Real-World Query Optimization and Processing"

III Relational Database Design

Functional Dependencies, BCNF, and Normalization (to be used in lecture)
Dr. Eick's Normalization Transparencies (to be used in lecture)
Jeff Ullman's Normalization Transparencies (only transparencies 1-6 are relevant; the others discuss relational algebra; will not be used in lecture)
Raghu's Physical Database Design Transparencies

IV Introduction to KDD and Making Sense of Data

Dr. Eick's Introduction to KDD transparencies.
OLAP/data warehouse transparencies to be used for COSC 6340; other more detailed collections include: Hector Garcia-Molina's Data Warehouse and OLAP transparencies, Raghu's OLAP/dataware house transparencies and Han/Kamber's OLAP/data warehouse transparencies. An "easy down-to earth" example of building a simple OLAP application.
Han/Kamber's Association Rule transparencies (only subset will be discussed in class) and Association Rule Survey Paper (in pdf-format).
Han/Kamber's Concept Learning transparencies (to be discussed in class)
Han/Kamber's Database Clustering Transparencies transparencies (only transprencies 1-39, and 90-99 are relevant; very likely, topic will be skipped due to the lack of time!)
Vipin Kumar's and Mohammed Zaki's Tutorial on "High Performance Data Mining" (1.6M pdf-file) --- given at KDD'00, Boston, Aug. 2000; reviews many data mining algorithms and discusses how to parallelise some of those algorithm.

V Internet Databases and XML

VI Object-Oriented Databases

Ullman's OML and OQL transparencies.

Relevant pagesfrom the Han/Kamber book

chapter 1 pages 1-9 (sections 1.1 and 1.2 only)

chapter 2 pages 39-68, 79-83(2.4.2, 2.4.3), and 95-99

chapter 6 225-239 pages (excluding 6.2.4), 244-259 (excluding 6.5), 269-271 (6.7 summary only).

pages chapter 7 279-296; 322-328 covering 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.9 and 7.10

Spring 2000 Group Activities

Check if your name occurs somewhere in a group; if not you are not registered for this section. Groups should have at least 3 "active" members; if this is not the case please let me know immediately!

Group1: Dai, Qing; Fan, Minying; Feng, Han; Gai, Guanhua; Huang, Fang.

Group2: Huang, Lei; Kolathur, Satheesh; Lang, Jun; Li, Yupeng; Lu, Chieh-Wei.

Group3: Luo, Yi; Ma, Jun; Shi,Yixiang; Su, Jing; Sun, Jingping.

Group4: Sun Xiaoyin; Tang, Jun; Teng, Haiyan; Thirumalai, Karthik; Tu, Haili.

Group5: Wang, Zhiqing; Wu, Xiaozhuang; Xu, Moujin; Xu, Wanting; Zhang De S.

Group6: Zhang, Yong; Zhang, Zhubin; Zhao Feng; Zheng, Ye. Group Members and e-mail addresses: Group1, Group2, Group3, Group4, Group5, Group6.

Grading

There will be an undergraduate material review exam, a midterm exam, and a final exam. Each student has to have a weighted average of 74.0 or higher in the exams / quizes of the course in order to receive a grade of "B-" or better for the course. Students will be responsible for material covered in the lectures and assigned in the readings. All homeworks and project reports are due at the date specified. No late submissions will be accepted after the due date. This policy will be strictly enforced. Course grades will be computed using a weight of approx. 74% for the exams, and a weight of 26% for the homeworks/assignments.

Translation number to letter grades:
A:100-90 A-:90-86 B+:86-82 B:82-78 B-:78-74 C+:74-70
C: 70-66 C-:66-62 D+:62-58 D:58-54 D-:54-50 F: 50-0

Only machine written solutions to homeworks and assignments are accepted (the only exception to this point are figures and complex formulas) in the assignments. Be aware of the fact that our only source of information is what you have turned in. If we are not capable to understand your solution, you will receive a low score. Moreover, students should not throw away returned assignments or tests.

Students may discuss course material and homeworks, but must take special care to discern the difference between collaborating in order to increase understanding of course materials and collaborating on the homework / course project itself. We encourage students to help each other understand course material to clarify the meaning of homework problems or to discuss problem-solving strategies, but it is not permissible for one student to help or be helped by another student in working through homework problems and in the course project. If, in discussing course materials and problems, students believe that their like-mindedness from such discussions could be construed as collaboration on their assignments, students must cite each other, briefly explaining the extent of their collaboration. Any assistance that is not given proper citation may be considered a violation of the Honor Code, and might result in obtaining a grade of F in the course, and in further prosecution.

Communication with the teaching staff

We strongly encourage students to come to my office hours or to talk to me directly after class. If a homework clarification is posted after a student has completed an assignment, the student should contact us as soon as possible to check if the assumptions s/he made are going to be accepted.

Please do not e-mail us with grading questions. If you want us/me to explain why I took points off, you can talk to me/us during our office hours.

Course Exams

Dates of the 2001 Exams

Tu., Feb. 13: UG-Material Exam
Th., March 22: Midterm Exam
Tu., May 8: Final Exam

UG Material Review Exam

Review list for Exam0
Feb. 17, 2000 Review Exam (in Word)
Solutions Exam0 (in Word)
Number Grades Review Exam

Midterm Exam

Exam1 (March 30, 2000) (in Word)
Exam1 Solutions (in Word)
Number Grades for Exam1 (average was 81 (one point higher than the average of Exam0); the exam will be returned to students during the April 27 class)

Final Exam

Review list for Final Exam
Final Exam (was given on May 9, 2000)

Database Qualifying Exam

TBDL

Course Homeworks and Projects Spring 2000

Solutions for all odd-numbered excercises in our textbook (chapters 1-21 only; this is a big postscript file of 220 pages)
Preliminary Specification "Logical Database Design for a Hotel Management Application"; direct your questions to Sanjiv Behl who is responsible for the specification of homework1, and will grade your solutions.
Ungraded homework (to be discussed in part in the class of March 21, 2000)
Specification Project2 (Oracle, SQL, and PL/SQL)
Graded Homework (due May 2, 1999 at 1:00p)
Approximate weights of the different parts: Project1 (10%), Project2 (13%), graded homework (3% due on May 2, 1p).

Useful Links

PL/SQL User's Guide and Reference (provided by ORACLE; you need to register for OTN (Oracle technology network) first; discusses most features excluding triggers --- see next link).
Using Oracle Triggers
Ruth Miller SQL/ORACLE Examples and Links
Home Page of COSC 3480 (Spring 2000 UH-COSC undergraduate database class)
Home Page Stanford's "First Course in Databases"
Homepage Stanford's "Second Course in Databases"
Dr. Eick's COSC 3480 Transparencies of Fall 1993 (postscript format)
Sample COSC 3480 exams and a few more transparencies (postscript format)
More Oracle Links: Stanford's and UMBC's documentation.

Accesses since Jan. 3, 2000:

last updated: March 31, 2001 9:14p

The Home Page of the Graduate Database Course COSC 6340 Spring 2001