Basic and Advanced Database Courses

At the beginning of the course, we explore some basic database concepts and adopt terminology. We give an overview of the most important data models. First we give brief remarks on historical network and hierarchical data models, and then we continue to investigate entity-relationship and relational data model. Only most important facts about entityrelationship model, together with some examples will be covered. The relational data model will be presented in much more detail, but we concentrate on exploring possibilities for its practical usage. Important remarks about theoretical background of the relational model are covered later in the text. We continue with the most important constructions of the Structured Query Language. In the advanced level course, we concentrate on the theoretical background of the relational model, explore it in some detail, and explain implications these concepts make to the usage of the relational model in practice. Among other topics, we explore functional dependencies in detail. Next, we give some pointers on update anomalies and the need to introduce normal (canonical) forms to relational database theory. We describe normal forms from first to third, including the Boyce-Codd normal form that belongs somewhere between the third and the fourth. We also give pointers about other normal forms. At the end we introduce two algorithms for relational database normalization decomposition and synthesis.