PAPER NO.7 DATABASE SYSTEMS
GENERAL OBJECTIVE
This paper is intended to equip the candidate with the knowledge, skills and attitudes that will enable him/her to design, develop, administer and manage databases.
LEARNING OUTCOMES
A candidate who passes this paper should be able to:
- Create databases to solve business problems
- Write structured query language (SQL) statements to manipulate data in databases
- Handle transactions and concurrency controls
- Administer databases
- Integrate databases and other applications
- Manage database integrity
CONTENT
Introduction to databases
- Overview of records, files and databases
- History of database systems
- Traditional file systems versus the database approach
- Characteristics, importance and limitations of database systems
- Database components and architecture
File organisation techniques
- Storage structures and blocking
- Structured and unstructured data
- Unordered files
- Sequential files
- Indexing
Database models
- The role of data modelling
- The hierarchical model
- The network model
- The relational model
- The object-oriented model
- The object-relational model
- Database model selection criteria
Database development life cycle
- Data and user requirements
- Specification of database requirements
- Stages of database development
- Conceptual, logical and physical database design
- Testing the database functionality
Relational database model
- Relational database concepts and properties
- E-R database design
- Database design anomalies
- Normalisation and denormalisation
- Relational algebra
- Creating database design
- Implementing database design
Structured query language (SQL)
- Data definition language
- Data manipulation language
- Structure of SQL statements
- Data control
- In-built functions
- Writing SQL statements
- Using SQL functions
- Optimising SQL queries
Transaction management and concurrency control
- Overview of transaction management
- Properties of a transaction
- Serialisability and concurrency control
- Lock-based and timestamp-based protocols
- Types of transaction failures
- Transaction recovery concepts and mechanisms
Database administration
- Overview of database administration
- Types of database users
- Functions and roles of database administrators
- Monitoring database performance
- Database tuning
Database security and integrity
- Security and integrity concepts
- Social, ethical and legal database issues
- Threats to database security and integrity
- Managing threats
- Establishing data backup and restore procedures
Distributed database systems
- Overview of distributed database systems
- Distribution methods – fragmentation and replication
- Concurrency control mechanisms in distributed systems
- Two-tier database architecture
- Three-tier database architecture
Data warehousing and data mining
- Overview of data warehousing
- Characteristics of a data warehouse
- Components of a data warehouse
- Types of data warehouses
- Overview of data mining
- Tools and techniques of data mining
Integrating databases with other applications
- Importance of integrating databases with other applications
- Integrating databases with other applications
- Basics of developing web enabled database applications
Emerging issues and trends