Data Systems, Higher Cert Computing

Cork24

Going into Year 2 in Sept. and not knowing what i am going to get in Data Systems, any one that have done this is this a Hard Module. i take it theirs alot of Stuff to get done in it?

Webmonkey

Do you mean database systems?

Cork24

Yea Sorry..

Webmonkey

Well I never done the "module" but I done databases as a subject back few years ago.

I wouldn't say it's the most difficult module.

Now this is what we kind of covered:

Lots of database theory...
Data Definition Lanauge vs Data Manipulation Language
Database Security, Concurrency, Recovery (transactions etc), integrity etc.
Legacy Systems and Data Cleansing
File Organisation and Data Processing
Database Views

More practical stuff:
Database Normalisation -> First normal form, second normal form, third normal form...5th normal form. Up to 3rd is usually okay.

SQL, select,insert,update,delete,joins,exists, not exists, where clause etc etc.
Labs demonstrating SQL

We might have gone into more detail though that time. It could be split over 2 modules now instead. I amn't sure.

Cork24

yeah its over 2 modules.
i download a few e books on pdf sites. where would i get SQL thats not a Server. and allow you to work away with the book? just want to get ahead of things.

Webmonkey

Cork24 wrote: »

yeah its over 2 modules.
i download a few e books on pdf sites. where would i get SQL thats not a Server. and allow you to work away with the book? just want to get ahead of things.

Good stuff.

You *could* use Microsoft Access, but there are parts of the SQL standard it does not support. While it seems fine in the begining to learn, down the road you might see problems (esp in the advanced SQL statements). You can give it a try to start with though. You can switch to SQL mode instead of the sickenly annoying Ms Access interface for retrieving/updating data.

Alternatively, you could download MySQL, an excellet free open source SQL server.
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/

Then to access this and perform operations such as creating tables, data entry, SQL statements etc, you could use MySQL Control center:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/mysqlcc/

The default username for MySQL is root and the password is blank if I'm not mistaken.

Have fun.

Cork24

thanks man..

I'll take a look at them their now.