THREE-DIMENSIONAL MODELING

Course objectives

General goals: Being able to design/evaluate properties, physical organization and concurrency management of a relational database Specific goals: Knowledge of properties for a relational schema and a decomposition. Ability to use relational algebra expression for querying information in a relational database. Awareness about operation costs for data management. Knwoledge and understanding: Theoretical foundation of database design and formal languages for database querying (relational algebra). Data structures for the storage and management of data. Applying knowledge and understanding: Designing relational schema with "good properties". Querying a database by means of relational algebra. Evaluate operation costs of foundational operations over a database management system under different storage methods. Analysis and evaluation skills: Being able to ealuate the properties of a relational database and its decomposition. Being able to select the best data structure for the database management system. Communication skills: Being able to present/share the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of a relational database.

Channel 1
GIUSEPPE PERELLI Lecturers' profile

Program - Frequency - Exams

Course program
Relational algebra (12 hrs): Introduction, Definitions, Relational operators. Relational theory (18 hrs): Relational schemes, functional dependencies, closure operators, keys, normal forms, decompositions. Physical organization (20 hrs): Indexed files, B-trees, query implementation, query optimization Concurrency (10hrs): Transaction management, locking methods, timestamps.
Prerequisites
Basics of Mathematics, Logics and Computer Science obtained from the courses of the first year of the programme.
Books
Lemahieu, W., vanden Broucke, S., & Baesens, B. (2018). Principles of Database Management: The Practical Guide to Storing, Managing and Analyzing Big and Small Data. Cambridge University Press.
Teaching mode
The course will be taught in classes, which will be either in presence or online (according to the pandemic situation and decisions taken by the central government body of the university).
Frequency
Attendance is optional but strongly encouraged.
Exam mode
The exam will be split into a written and an oral test. The written test will consist to a set of exercises, each of them about one of the 4 parts of the course and it is mandatory to access the oral test. The oral test will be a brief discussion of the written test, together with questions about the main definitions and theorem presented in class.
Bibliography
- Abraham Silberschatz, Henry F. Korth, S. Sudarshan: Database System Concepts. - P. Atzeni, S. Ceri, S. Paraboschi, R. Torlone: Database Systems - Concepts, Languages and Architectures, The McGraw-Hill Companies - J. D. Ullman: Principles of Database & Knowledge-Base Systems, Vol. 1: Classical Database Systems - Course material
Lesson mode
In class lectures.
  • Academic year2025/2026
  • CourseApplied Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
  • CurriculumSingle curriculum
  • Year2nd year
  • Semester1st semester
  • SSDINF/01
  • CFU6