Dilip's Brief Introduction to Relational Databases
cs.unc.edu
Lesson Overview
As part of the spring 1998 Advanced Java Course at UNC, I am giving the first seminar intended to introduce the audience to relational databases and give a tutorial on Microsoft Access. This lecture precedes one by Wen Zhang and Ganesh Srivinas about connecting to a database from java, and a final database lecture by Will Sexton and Rich Thornett about the "JDBC".
We start off quickly looking at the notion of "database" and consider the simple relational database model of tables with tuples (rows) and attributes (columns). A popular way to design a database is through ER diagrams, and we look at a sample diagram. I hope that you won't get bogged down when we discuss the relational algebra, set theoretic notions that the relational model is based upon. Though it is important to have some basic understanding of the relational algebra, in practice most users take advantage of a higher level language for retrieving information from a database, and we look at SQL (Structured Query Language) as a common example. Finally, we motivate the use of Microsoft Access, a popular relational database system, and follow-on with a detailed tutorial on how to use Access.
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