Information on the Final Exam:

From the official list, details are currently

ISYS 210 002 Database Management

Wednesday June 6th, 2001

10:30am - 12:30pm Randell 121

The final examination counts for 25% of the overall grade for the course.

It will cover material from the whole of the course, but the focus is definitely on what has been covered since the midterm. Examine the detailed syllabus to see everything we have covered in bullet point form, and with the sections of the textbook you will need to revise.

For your convenience, here are some of the most important topics likely to appear on the examination. There will be other stuff as well, but make sure you understand all the following:

ERD syntax, conventions

How to read an ERD

Diagnosing problems in an ERD (You won’t have to draw one from scratch, but be prepared to complete or fix an existing one)

Appropriate choice of cardinality

Translation of ERD to schema

foreign keys,

weak entities,

1:M relationships,

M:M relationships

SQL, including joins (you will have to read and write SQL to pass this examination – if you have not worked through the example SQL and experimented with it then do so now!)

select, update, delete statements

group by, having clause

order by clause

where clause

relationship of select clauses to relational operators

use of simple functions in select statements

diagnosing problems in an SQL statement

Role of views in SQL and in relational model

Advantages and disadvantages of views

Relationship of views to data independence

Normalization

Normal forms 1, 2 and 3

Functional dependency

Recognizing when something is not in a particular normal form.

Altering a schema so that it complies with a particular normal form