The teaching is organized as follows:

Learning outcomes

Module: Database theory
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The first part of the course, called “Databases Theory”, has the aim to provide the student with the necessary concepts and methods for the design of a database and its applications. In particular, it will be focused on the methodologies for the conceptual and logical design of a database and for the successive database implementation on database systems. Moreover, some general techniques for the implementation of database systems will be presented and the fundamental characteristics of the query language SQL and of the relational algebra will be illustrated.

Module: Database technology
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The second part of the course has the aim to provide the student with the necessary concepts and methods for the design of data-intensive web applications. In particular, this module will be focused on a methodology for the logical design of a web application that interacts with a database system (DBMS).
Moreover, the approach Model-View-Controller (MVC-2 servlet centric) will be illustrated and applied to some examples. Finally, the main issues concerning the treatment of multimedia datasets in a DBMS will be presented.

LAB
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The “Lab” ("Laboratorio" in italian) of this course has the aim to provide the student with the necessary concepts and methods for the implementation of a database and its applications. In particular, this module will be focused on the usage of a specific DBMS for the creation, management and manipulation of a database by means of SQL commands. Moreover, some general techniques for the implementation of web applications will be presented. In particular a MVC-2 architecture based on the Servlet and the Java Server Pages (JSP) technologies will be illustrated and used to show the implementation of some practical examples.

Program

Module: Database theory
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* Introduction to database managemente systems (DBMS): architectures and functionalities of a DBMS. Phisical and logical data independence. Data models. Concepts of model, schema and instance of a database. Languages for database systems. DBMS vs. file system.
* Conceptual database design: conceptual data models. The Entity-Relationship model (ER). Elements of the ER model: entities, attributes, relationships, ISA hierarchies and cardinality constraints.
* Logical database design: logical data models, the relational data model. Elements of the relational data models: relations and integrity constraints. Mapping between conceptual schemas in ER model and logical schema in the relational model. Languages for data definition: SQL as DDL. Table creation and integrity constraints definition in SQL.
* Interacting with a database system: languages for the definition, querying and update of a database. The relational algebra. SQL: select-from-where statement, join in SQL, the GROUP BY and ORDER BY clauses, using subqueries. SQL for update: INSERT, DELETE and UPDATE statements. Views.

Module: Database technology
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* The internal architecture of a DBMS. Transactions. Transactions properties. The concurrency control: schedules, view and conflict equivalence, the two-phase locking. Access methods (indexes): primary and secondary indexes, B-+tree, hashing based access methods.
* Web Server: basic internet, basic HTML (form), basic HTTP.
* Information systems on the Web: techniques for the interaction between a DBMS and a HTTP server (CGI, Servlet, JSP); JDBC library and Java data beans; the architecture proposed by the MVC-2 approach.
* a methodology for the logical design of a data-intesive web application.
* XML
* features of multimedia data: compression techniques and indexing

LAB
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1. Introduction to DBMS PostgreSQL: connection to a database, table creation, insert, update and alter table.
2. PostgreSQL: integrity constraints, reactions to contraints violations.
3. PostgreSQL: simple SQL queries.
4. PostgreSQL: complex SQL queries.
5. HTML: structure of an HTML document, main tags, tables.
6. HTML: form.
7. Servlet Engine on an application server. Examples of simple servlets.
8. Servlet and JDBC. Connection to a DBMS PostgreSQL. Simple servlet of the interaction with a DBMS.
9. Java bean e servlet.
10. Java Server Pages (JSP)
11. JSP and servlet: a software architecture base on the Model View Controller approach.
12. Servlet/JSP and multimedia datasets, css and javascript.

Bibliography

Examination Methods

Written test for every module. The final grade is obtained by computing the weighted average of the grade obtained in the Theory modules (3/4) and the grade obtained in the Lab module (1/4).