Lecture-1: Introduction to Database

Course CSB2204: Database Systems

Assoc. Prof. Mohammed Gadelrab

School of Artificial Intelligence & Data Management
Badr University in Assiut (BUA)
 Lecture Overview

Part I: Course Overview
 Course Objectives
 Course Structure
 References & Useful Resources

Part II: Introduction to Database

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 Part I: Overview of the course

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 Course Objectives

This course provides an introduction to the fundamental concepts of database systems. Students will
learn about database design, data modeling, SQL, normalization, and database management systems
(DBMS). The course will also cover the basics of transaction management, concurrency control, and
database security. By the end of the course, students will be able to design and implement a relational
database and write SQL queries to retrieve and manipulate data. Moreover, students will be exposed
briefly to NoSQL databases.


Course Objectives:
 Understand the fundamental concepts of databases and Database Management Systems and its importance.

 Learn to design and normalize relational databases.

 Gain proficiency in SQL for querying and managing data.

 Explore advanced topics like transactions, indexing, and database security.

 Get an overview of emerging trends in database technologies.

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 Course Structure

Lectures: 12 (1 per week)

Practical Sessions: 12 labs (1 per week)

Assessment and Grading:
 Quizzes: 3 quizzes (15%: 5 per each)
 Presence and activities: (5%)
 Projects and deliverables: 5%
 Mid-term exam: 25 %
 Final Exam: 50%
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 References & Useful Resources

Text Books:
 A. Silberschatz, H. F. Korth, S. Sudarshan, Database System Concepts, 7th edition,
McGraw-Hill.
 Ramez ElMasri, Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, 7th edition,
Pearson.

Online Courses & Tutorials:
 Mahara-Tech Free Course: Database Fundamentals
 FreeCodeCamp: Relational Database

Tools:
 Mysql
 Postgresql
 NoSQL: (e.g., MongoDB or Cassandra)
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 Part II: Introduction to Database

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Outline

What is a Database (DB)? Why ?

What is Database Management Systems (DBMS)? Why?

Simplified DB System Environment

Typical DBMS Functionality

Examples of Database Application Fields

Example of a Simple Database

Main Characteristics of the Database Approach

History of Database System

Recent DB development

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 What is DB?

Data:
– Known and often connected facts that can be
recorded and have an implicit meaning.

Database:
 A collection of related data.
 Databases touch all aspects of our lives

Mini-world:
 Some part of the real world about which data is stored
in a database. For example, student grades and
transcripts at a university.

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 What is DBMS?

Database Management System (D BMS):
– A software package/ system to facilitate the creation and maintenance of a computerized database.

DBMS contains the following:
 A collection of interrelated data
 A set of programs to access the data
 An environment that is both convenient and efficient to use


Database System:
 The DBMS software + the data itself. Sometimes, the applications are also included.
 Database systems are used to manage collections of data that are:
●
Highly valuable
●
Relatively large
●
Accessed by multiple users and applications, often at the same time.

A modern database system is a complex software system whose task is to manage a large, complex collection of data.

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 Why is DB & DBMS?

In the early days, database applications were built directly on top of file systems, which have
several limitations:
 Data redundancy and inconsistency: data was stored in multiple file formats resulting in
duplication of information in different files and sometime unaligned or contradicted
information.
 Difficulty in accessing data:

Need to write a new program to carry out each new task.
 Data isolation:

Multiple files and formats.
 Integrity problems:

Integrity constraints (e.g., account balance > 0) become “buried” in program code
rather than being stated explicitly.

Hard to add new constraints or change existing ones.

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 Why is DB & DBMS? (cont.)

Lack of atomicity of updates:
 Failures may leave database in an inconsistent state with partial updates carried out.
 Example: Transfer of funds from one account to another should either complete or not
happen at all.

Lack of concurrent access by multiple users:
 Concurrent access needed for performance.
 Uncontrolled concurrent accesses can lead to inconsistencies

Ex: Two people reading a balance (say 100) and updating it by withdrawing money (say
50 each) at the same time

Security problems:
 Hard to provide user access to some, but not all, data.
✓ Database systems offer solutions to all the above problems.
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 Simplified Database System Environment

Actual data stored in the Database

Meta-data: that contains database definition

Database Management System (DBMS):
 Software that process queries and
programs
 Software to access stored data

Application program: software the uses and
interacts with the database.

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 Typical DBMS Functionality

Define a particular database in terms of its data types, structures, and constraints.

Construct or Load the initial database contents on a secondary storage medium

Manipulating the database:
 Retrieval: Querying, generating reports
 Modification: Insertions, deletions and updates to its content
 Accessing the database through Web applications

Processing and Sharing by a set of concurrent users and application programs –
yet, keeping all data valid and consistent

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 Example of Database Application Fields (1 of 2)
●
Universities: students, courses, registration, grades, etc.
●
Enterprise Information:
– Sales: customers, products, purchases.
– Accounting: payments, receipts, assets.
– Human Resources: Information about employees, salaries, payroll taxes.
●
Manufacturing: management of production, inventory, orders, supply chain.
●
Banking and finance:
– customer information, accounts, loans, and banking transactions.
– Credit card transactions.
●
Finance: sales and purchases of financial instruments (e.g., stocks and bonds;
storing real-time market data
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 Example of Database Application Fields (2 of 2)
●
Airlines: reservations, schedules.
●
Telecommunication: records of calls, texts, and data usage, generating
monthly bills, maintaining balances on prepaid calling cards.
●
Web-based services:
– Online retailers: order tracking, customized recommendations.
– Online advertisements.
●
Navigation systems: For maintaining the locations of various places of
interest along with the exact routes of roads, train systems, buses, etc.
●
Social Media sites: such as Facebook:
– Posts, reactions, messages, friends, groups, reels.
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 Example of a Simple Database (1 of 5)

Mini-world for the example:
– Part of a UNIVERSITY environment.

Some mini-world entities:
– STUDENTs
– COURSEs
– SECTIONs (of COURSEs)
– (academic) DEPARTMENTs
– INSTRUCTORs

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 Example of a Simple Database (2 of 5)

Some mini-world relationships:
– SECTIONs are of specific COURSEs
– STUDENTs take SECTIONs
– COURSEs have prerequisite COURSEs
– INSTRUCTORs teach SECTIONs
– COURSEs are offered by DEPARTMENTs
– STUDENTs major in DEPARTMENTs

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 Example of a Simple Database (3 of 5)

COURSE: Course_name Course_numb Credit_hours Department
er
Intro to Computer Science C S1310 4 CS
Data Structures C S3320 4 CS
Discrete Mathematics MATH2410 3 MATH
Database C S3380 3 CS

Student_number Section_identifier Grade


GRADE_REPORT:
17 112 B
17 119 C
8 85 A
8 92 A
8 102 B
8 135 A
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 Main Characteristics of the Database Approach (1 of 2)
●
Data Abstraction:
– A data model is used to hide storage details and present the users with a conceptual view of the database.
– Programs refer to the data model constructs rather than data storage details.

●
Support of multiple views of the data:
– Each user may see a different view of the database, which describes only the data of interest to that us

●
Self-describing nature of a database system:
– A DBMS catalog stores the description of a particular database (e.g. data structures, types, and constraints)
– The description is called meta-data.
– This allows the DBMS software to work with different database applications.

●
Insulation between programs and data:
– Called program-data independence.
– Allows changing data structures and storage organization without having to change the DBMS access programs.

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 Main Characteristics of the Database Approach (2 of 2)
●
Sharing data and multi-user transaction processing:
– Allowing a set of concurrent users to retrieve from and to update the
database.
●
Concurrency control within the DBMS guarantees that each
transaction is correctly executed or aborted
●
Recovery subsystem ensures each completed transaction has its effect
permanently recorded in the database
●
OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) is a major part of database
applications. This allows hundreds of concurrent transactions to execute
per second.

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 History of Database Systems
●
1950s and early 1960s:
●
1980s:

– – SQL becomes industrial standard

Data processing using magnetic tapes for storage
– Tapes provided only sequential access – Parallel and distributed database systems

– Punched cards for input – Object-oriented database systems

●
Late 1960s and 1970s: ●
1990s:
– Hard disks allowed direct access to data – Large decision support and data-mining applications
– Network and hierarchical data models in widespread – Large multi-terabyte data warehouses
use
– Emergence of Web commerce
– Ted Codd defines the relational data model
●
2000s:
●
Would win the ACM Turing Award for this work
– Big data storage systems: Google BigTable, Yahoo PNuts, Amazon,
●
IBM Research begins System R prototype
– “NoSQL” systems: Big data analysis: beyond SQL
●
UC Berkeley (Michael Stonebraker) begins Ingres
prototype – Map reduce and friends
●
Oracle releases first commercial relational
database ●
2010s:
– High-performance (for the era) transaction processing – Massively parallel database systems

– Multi-core main-memory databases

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 Recent Development

Traditional Applications:
 Numeric and Textual Databases

More Recent Applications:
 Multimedia Databases
 Geographic Information Systems (G IS)
 Biological and Genome Databases
 Data Warehouses
 Mobile databases
 Real-time and Active Databases

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