Course Description
Investigates how database management system techniques are used to design, develop, implement and maintain modern database applications in organizations.
Course Objectives
This course provides a managerial understanding and approach to the technical subject of database management. The course will illustrate the important role that database systems play in an organization and provide you with a background to understand the subject, and a foundation upon which to build your management decisions. This course is designed to investigate how database management system techniques are used to design, develop, implement and maintain modern database applications in organizations.
Week 1
Lecture: Course Introduction
Lecture: The Database Environment
Outcomes
- Discuss the environment in which the databases function
- Explain why databases continue to grow in number and importance
- Explain at least 10 advantages of the database approach as compared to traditional file processing
- Identify several costs and risks of the database approach
- Describe the life cycle of the systems development project including an emphasis on database analysis, design, and implementation activities
- Discuss the rules of the individuals who design, implement, use, and administer databases
Week 2
Lecture: Data Modeling
Outcomes
- Explain how to write good names and definitions for entities, relationships, and attributes
- Distinguish unary, binary, and ternary relationships and give a common example of each
- Draw an E-R diagram to represent common business situations
- Convert many to many relationships to associative entity types
- Recognize when to use subtype forward/super type relationships in data modeling
- Discuss the various categories of business rules
- Use both specialization and a generalization as techniques for designing super type forward/subtype relationships
Week 3
Lecture: Objected-Oriented Data Modeling
Outcomes
- Describe the activities in the different faces of the object oriented development lifecycle
- Compare and contrast the object oriented model with the E-R and EER models
- Explain the properties of relations
- Discuss the first normal form, second normal form, and third normal form
- Use normalization to decompose our relation with anomalies into well structured relations
Week 4
Lecture: Physical Database Design and Performance
Outcomes
- Describe the physical database design process, its objectives, and deliverables
- Explain how to select an appropriate file organization by balancing various important design factors
- Describe three important types of file organization
Week 5
Lecture: Distributed Databases
Outcomes
- Explain the business conditions that are drivers for the use of distributed databases in organizations
- Explain the potential advantages and risks associated with distributed databases
- Explain the four strategies for the design of distributed databases, options within each strategy, and the factors to consider in selection among these strategies
- Explain the salient features of several distributed database management systems
Week 6
Lecture: Relational Databases
Outcomes
- Discuss the basic concepts of relational databases
- List follow the basic relational operations
- Explain relational keys and structures
Week 7
Lecture: Database Administration
Outcomes
- Discuss the several major functions of data administration and database administration
- Describe the role of data dictionaries and information repository as and how they are used by data administrators
- Describe the problem of database security and at least five techniques used to enhance that security
Week 8
Lecture: Data Warehouse Architectures
Outcomes
- Explain the basic concepts of data warehouse
- List reasons most organizations today need data warehousing. Be able to describe the three levels in a data warehouse architecture
- Describe the basic environment that must be set up to enable Internet and intranet database enabled connectivity
- Describe web services and the issues associated with successful deployment in light traffic commerce
- Discuss web security and privacy issues
The course description, objectives and learning outcomes are subject to change without notice based on enhancements made to the course. January 2012
