Advanced Databases

Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• The internals of a database management system
• The issues involved in developing database management software
• The variety of available DBMS types and the circumstances in which they are appropriate

Subject Specific Practical Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Select an appropriate DBMS for an application
• Implement components of a DBMS

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Demonstrate how a DBMS processes, optimises and executes a query
• Choose appropriate approaches for data storage and access
• Identify issues arising from concurrent or distributed processing and select appropriate approaches to mitigate those isues

DBMS Internals

Relational Algebra

Data

• Types of data, including spatial and temporal

Data Storage

• The memory hierarchy
• Fields, records and blocks
• The Five Minute Rule
• Row stores vs. column stores

Access Structures

• Indexes
• B-Trees
• Hash tables
• Multidimensional Access Structures: grid file, partitioned hash, kd-tree, quad-tree, Rtree, UB-tree, bitmap indexes

Query Processing

• Physical plan operators: one-pass algorithms, nested-loop joins, two-pass algorithms
• Query optimisation: algebraic laws, cost estimation, cost- based plan selection

Transaction Processing

• Chained transactions, nested transactions
• Savepoints
• Compensating transactions
• Concurrency

Parallel Databases

• Partitioning techniques
• Types of parallelism: intraquery, interquery, intraoperation, interoperation

Distributed Databases

Message Queues

Stream Processing

Retrieval

Data Warehouses and OLAP

Non-Relational Databases

• Hierarchical, network, object-oriented, object-relational, XML

NoSQL

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.

Repeat

An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.