Undergraduate Database Course Research Articles

The 2022 undergraduate database course in computer science

research-article The 2022 undergraduate database course in computer science: what to teach? Authors: Mikey Goldweber Xavier University Xavier UniversityView Profile , Min Wei Microsoft MicrosoftView Profile , Sherif Aly The American University in Cairo The American University in CairoView Profile , Rajendra K. Raj Rochester Institute of Technology Rochester Institute of TechnologyView Profile , Mohamed Mokbel University of Minnesota University of MinnesotaView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM InroadsVolume 13Issue 3September 2022 pp 16–21https://doi.org/10.1145/3549545Published:23 August 2022Publication History 0citation126DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads126Last 12 Months126Last 6 weeks19 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

DiagrammER: A Web Application to Support the Teaching-Learning Process of Database Courses Through the Creation of E-R Diagrams

This paper presents a web application to support the teaching-learning process of undergraduate database courses, which allows students to practice their knowledge on data modeling using Entity-Relationship (E-R) diagrams. The web application is oriented to teachers and students: teachers prepare examples and exercises, which can have associated E-R diagrams; on the other hand, students are able to design E-R diagrams, which they can review at any time, they also have the option of viewing and solve some of the exercises designed by the teacher. The development of the web application is explained; a comparison of similar existing E-R diagram systems is presented; and the operation of the web application is shown through the creation of an E-R diagram. The results of an instrument applied to students for the evaluation of the web application are provided.

The Rise of NoSQL Systems

Transaction processing systems are primarily based on the relational model of data and offer the advantages of decades of research and experience in enforcing data quality through integrity constraints, allowing concurrent access and supporting recoverability. From a performance standpoint, they offer joins-based query optimization and data structures to promote fast reads and writes, but are usually vertically scalable from a hardware standpoint. NoSQL (Not Only SQL) systems follow different data representation formats than relations, such as key-value pairs, graphs, documents or column-families. They offer a flexible data representation format as well as horizontal hardware scalability so that Big Data can be processed in real time. In this review article, we review recent research on each type of system, and then discuss how teaching of NoSQL may be incorporated into traditional undergraduate database courses in information systems curricula.

RATest: Explaining Wrong Relational Queries Using Small Examples.

We present a system called RATEST, designed to help debug relational queries against reference queries and test database instances. In many applications, e.g., classroom learning and regression testing, we test the correctness of a user query Q by evaluating it over a test database instance D and comparing its result with that of evaluating a reference (correct) query Q 0 over D. If Q(D) differs from Q 0(D), the user knows Q is incorrect. However, D can be large (often by design), which makes debugging Q difficult. The key idea behind RATEST is to show the user a much smaller database instance D' ⊆ D, which we call a counterexample, such that Q(D') ≠ Q 0(D'). RATEST builds on data provenance and constraint solving, and employs a suite of techniques to support, at interactive speed, complex queries involving differences and group-by aggregation. We demonstrate an application of RATEST in learning: it has been used successfully by a large undergraduate database course in a university to help students with a relational algebra assignment.

Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples.

For testing the correctness of SQL queries, e.g., evaluating student submissions in a database course, a standard practice is to execute the query in question on some test database instance and compare its result with that of the correct query. Given two queries Q 1 and Q 2, we say that a database instance D is a counterexample (for Q 1 and Q 2) if Q 1(D) differs from Q 2(D); such a counterexample can serve as an explanation of why Q 1 and Q 2 are not equivalent. While the test database instance may serve as a counterexample, it may be too large or complex to read and understand where the inequivalence comes from. Therefore, in this paper, given a known counterexample D for Q 1 and Q 2, we aim to find the smallest counterexample D' ⊆ D where Q 1(D') ≠ Q 2(D'). The problem in general is NP-hard. We give a suite of algorithms for finding the smallest counterexample for different classes of queries, some more tractable than others. We also present an efficient provenance-based algorithm for SPJUD queries that uses a constraint solver, and extend it to more complex queries with aggregation, group-by, and nested queries. We perform extensive experiments indicating the effectiveness and scalability of our solution on student queries from an undergraduate database course and on queries from the TPC-H benchmark. We also report a user study from the course where we deployed our tool to help students with an assignment on relational algebra.

The Design and Effect of a Scaffolded Concept Mapping Strategy on Learning Performance in an Undergraduate Database Course

This paper proposes a scaffolded concept mapping strategy, which considers a student's (high or low) prior knowledge, and provides flexible learning aids (scaffolding and fading) for reading and drawing a concept map. The goal is that the whole class should progress in synchronized fashion through this strategy, with each student achieving meaningful learning. The scaffolding is tailored to the student's needs, with various levels of support. The increasing demand for scaffolding, and its constant evolution, means that software aids are needed. The authors adopted a systematic instructional design, with associated software, to create a learning environment that supports the execution of the strategy. The paper also investigates whether this strategy improved student learning for 54 undergraduates in a database management system course. The results indicate that the students who used the strategy had better learning achievements than those who only experienced traditional lectures. Moreover, the implementation of the strategy received positive student feedback.

Incorporating NoSQL into a database course

This article introduces the concepts of Big Data and NoSQL and describes a semester long web-based project that uses both a relational database (Oracle 11g) and a NoSQL (MongoDB) database for an undergraduate database course. The relational database stores the record information of an online sales system and the NoSQL database stores three manuals. The semester long assignment and its implementation are available as a download.

The advanced database course and the information systems 2010 model curriculum: an experiential approach to learning

Employing a collaborative project-based pedagogical approach that presents ideas and situations that are reflective of real-world experiences provides a challenging learning experience for students, both as individuals and team members. The IS 2010 curriculum guidelines serve as a useful reference for defining the learning objectives of an undergraduate database course. In this paper, a portion of these guidelines also serves as the foundation for the development of a student project to be used in an undergraduate advanced database course at the authors’ institution. This paper provides the specifications for the project, examples of possible solutions to most elements of the project, and offers grading rubrics that may be used when assessing the achievement of student learning outcomes and determining overall project success.

Exposing undergraduate students to database system internals

In Spring 2003, Joe Hellerstein at Berkeley and Natassa Ailamaki at CMU collaborated in designing and running parallel editions of an undergraduate database course that exposed students to developing code in the core of a ful-function database system. As part of this exercise, our course teams developed new programming projects based on the PostgreSQL open-source DBMS. This report describes our experience with this effort.

JDBC demonstration courseware using Servlets and Java Server Pages

This paper describes the design and functionality of courseware developed to demonstrate the JDBC API. The courseware is used in an advanced undergraduate database course that emphasizes the use of Web access to database systems. The JDBC courseware is written using Java Servlets and Java Server Pages, allowing the user to view the metadata associated with a database, to view and browse the information in a database according to the database metadata, and to query and/or manipulate data using SQL statements. The advantage of the courseware is that it demonstrates the main functionality of the JDBC API in an application-independent manner. The courseware can access any ODBC-compliant database, emphasizing the generality of the JDBC API and helping students understand how JDBC can be used to query the metadata of the database as well as the database contents.

Developing integrated Web and database applications using JAVA applets and JDBC drivers

With the maturity of network technology, the deterministic factor of a 'successful' web site does not as much depend on its connectivity to the Internet, rather the content of web pages plays a more important role. The inclusion of dynamic data, for example, has become an increasingly desirable feature of a web page. Web servers that support dynamic web pages are capable of retrieving data at the time of user requests. Rather than being statically included in the web page, these dynamically retrieved data may physically reside in various file systems or database servers across the Internet.JAVA, a new object-oriented programming language, has become a buzzword since its introduction by Sun Microsystems in 1994 [1, 2, 3]. It was claimed that JAVA, via its ability to embed applets in a web page, would make the content of a web page alive and dynamic. Data and information on a web page can now be updated dynamically when users request them.In this paper, we discuss our experience of developing JAVA applets that use various types of JDBC (JAVA Database Connectivity) drivers to connect to and then manipulate data stored in SQL (Structured Query Language) database servers. We first start with the discussion of general client/server model involving JDBC, and then introducing the procedure of setting up programming projects employing this approach in an undergraduate database course.

WEB-based query processing in a database course project

One of the prominent uses of WWW has been WEB-based querying of databases. Search sites such as Yahoo and Infoseek present the WWW user with a form to be filled in with a query and return the results of the search. WEB forms are also being increasingly used for interaction with database management systems. One key element of the Intranet environment is the use of WEB-based facilities for query processing.In our undergraduate database course project, we decided to not only have the students design and implement relations in a relational database management system, but also provide a WEB-based facility that allows for fairly complex query processing. The actual data was the entire catalog (12,000 holdings) of the Department of Business Management's Library. The students had to first design the appropriate normalized relations and then load the data into a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). We used PostgreSQL as the RDBMS [1]. The students then designed WEB forms that allowed a user to query the library database using a Web browser. The user could specify simple and complex queries. The students used PHP [2], a public domain tool, to embed SQL queries into ordinary HTML form documents. This avoided the use of CGI scripts or Java applets, thus making the programming task much simpler.This paper presents details of the mechanics of the student project, examples from the students' submissions, and concluding remarks that highlight the benefits of WEB-based query processing.

An intelligent tutor for normal form determination

In this paper an intelligent computer-aided instruction system for teaching normal form determination is described. The general architecture of intelligent tutoring systems is also discussed, as are the results of experience using the tool in an undergraduate database course.

OMEGA: A database management system for academic use

This paper describes an implementation of the relational database management system, OMEGA. OMEGA is designed to be "query language independent" in order to promote the investigation of experimental query languages by graduate students. OMEGA also supports the query language SQL and as such, is used in undergraduate database courses to demonstrate the features of SQL.