A Suite of Case Studies in Relational Database Design

Abstract

<p>Typical relational database design examples in textbooks and undergraduate courses are small and do not provide any real opportunity to practice the design, they simply illustrate and illuminate the principles. On the other end of the spectrum are typical industrial databases whose designs are complex and extensive, and so not suitable as a project for a one term database course. The objective of this thesis is to design and develop a collection of ten projects that would be usable as term projects in relational database system design for a typical undergraduate database course. To this end a suite of ten case studies are presented. Each project is taken from its informal specification to a relational schema using entity-relationship modeling and its translation to relational model, to database schema, to implementation of the database, to interactive SQL querying of the installed database and finished with a simple application programmed in C using the installed database and accessing it via embedded SQL.</p>