Review these concepts from the text, your homework and your class notes. They represent the material that may appear on the exam. Only the concepts on this review will be on the exam. The exam will last 75 minutes. The exam is closed book and closed notes.
Chapter 1 (All) Introduction to Database Systems sections
- What is a database management system (DBMS)?
- What are the three levels of abstraction of a DBMS? Briefly describe them.
- What is data independence? Briefly describe physical data independence and logical data independence.
Chapter 2 (All) The Entity-Relationship Model
- Could you draw a simple Entity-Relationship diagram similar to the diagrams in the homework?
- You should be able to draw the following concepts on an ERD:
- Entity set
- Relationship entity set
- Attributes
- Indicate the primary key (for an entity set and a weak entity set)
- One-to-one relationship
- One-to-many relationship
- Many-to-many relationship
- Total participation
- Partial participation
- Weak entity set
Chapter 3 (All) The Relational Model
- Could you translate the following components of an ERD into SQL-92?
- Entity set
- Relationship entity set
- Attributes
- Primary key (for an entity set and a weak entity set)
- Total participation
- Partial participation
- Weak entity set
- Do you understand the best way to translate a one-to-many relationship set into SQL-92?
- Do you understand how to translate a many-to-many relationship set into SQL-92?
- What does a foreign key constraint in SQL-92 accomplish?
- Could you identify which participation constraints can not be captured using SQL-92? (Section 3.4.5)
Chapter 4 (Sections 4.1-4.2) Relational Algebra
- Using the following operators, could you write queries in relational algebra?
Union (È
)
Intersection (Ç
)
Cross-product or Cartesian product (X)
Difference (-)
Selection (s
)
Projection (p
)
Join ( )
Renaming (r
)
Division (/)
Chapter 15 (Sections 15.1-15.7) Schema Refinement and Normal Forms
- What are the four problems caused by redundancy in a database? Briefly describe them.
- Using the Armstrong Axioms, could you prove if a given functional dependency holds on a relation R given a set F of functional dependencies?
- Could you use the attribute closure algorithm, given in class, to check if a given dependency is in the closure of a set F of functional dependencies?
- Given a relation and the functional dependencies that hold on it, could you identify the Normal form it is in? Could you explain your answer?
- Briefly describe the two properties of decomposition: lossless-join and dependency-preservation. Given an example of the decomposition of a relation, could you tell if it was losssless and dependency-preserving?
- Given a relation and the functional dependencies that hold on it, could you decompose a relation that is not in BCNF into relations that are at least 3NF?