Database Schemas Used in SQL University Courses – State of the Art

Database Schemas Used in SQL University Courses – State of the Art

연구 분야: Databases

학회: International Conference on Computer Science and Education in Computer Science

The body of knowledge in IT courses area includes topics about relational databases in which students have to obtain at least basic knowledge and skills in SQL. Also for the students in the areas of computer science majors SQL is an obligatory part of knowledge and skills. To be effective, SQL training in university courses has to use appropriate case studies (i.e. database schemas) which are semantically clear, simple, and suitable to demonstrate the major SQL functionality not only “on paper” but also in real DBMS environment (or DBMS sandbox). Moreover, the appropriate database state is important to demonstrate understandable results from SQL queries, which can be manually evaluated by students to compare with results of execution in real database environment. In this paper some popular database schemas and states used in SQL training in university level courses are analyzed from these points of view. For this study, six schemas from popular database books used in university courses are considered. Two major streams in database schemas and states are distinguishable. One is focused on overall solution, that covers database design topics and SQL training, another is focused only on SQL training. It is found that a possible break point between these streams is to use database schema which is complex enough for demonstration of the design process, and after that to use simplified version of the database schema with reduced number of records for SQL training.