Personal Summary

Liu Zhe

The whole semester has finally come to an end, and now I want to briefly summarize my experience in database course this semester.

Part 1: Professional knowledge learnt from the course

I think the key idea of this course is to provide basic knowledge related to database technology and give instructions on its application. From both the professor’s instruction and the later on students’ teaching, I learnt some fundamental and important knowledge in this area in a systematic and comprehensive way.

The first several classes were taught by our professor, Koo, from whom I had a rough idea of database. I knew what data is and how to store data, and then learnt something about relational model, which is one of the most important concepts of database knowledge system. Things learnt from these lessons at the very beginning turned out to be really important in the following studying because the whole structure of database technology is based on the concepts of data storage and the model used to manipulate the data.

Then we students started to prepare and give lessons on our own, one or two teams each lesson. Every team has its style and all of them used their special creative methods and impressive manner to attract us and thus help us learn what they want to impart. The first lesson taught by students is SQL, and I learnt many basic concepts and manipulation methods. Then from the class E-R model, I improved my understanding of data model from relational model to entity-relational model. Database design and application design gave me an overall instruction on how to design a database with comprehensive consideration, and these lessons were also very instructive in that its content helped us with our project development. After the midterm project report, my team, ADAM, gave a lecture to the class on data serialization, and we used XML as an example to introduce data serialization technique and showed its importance in modern computer science. From then on, the lecture topics were enlarged and enriched. For example, a two-lesson series on data storage and querying provided a very thorough and profound insight into data storage mechanism and related computer techniques, which drew my attention to the efficiency and effectiveness of the underlying data access. Another example is the lecture on transaction, which had never been related to database by me before. I learnt from this lesson that it is the unit of work performed within a DBMS against a database and a database transaction must be atomic, consistent, isolated and durable. The last lecture had the topic system architecture, which I thought was beyond the scope of database but later found that we could gain a better understanding of database field from a high level.

There are totally ten lecture topics in this semester, which are listed below. Under the professor’s guidance and with all groups’ innovation, these seemingly isolated topics have been connected together coherently and logically, forming one and another storyline. I believe the professional knowledge and its application to practice must be valuable for my future studying.