Databases весна 2026

Grading

• practical tasks and quizes - 2 points
• project - 3 points
• final oral exam - from -2 to +5 points

Course materials

Materials

Important deadlines

05 May - final project deadline

12 May - final test and oral exam

Exam program

• 1) Definitions: data, database, DBMS. 3 data models.
• 2) Relational data model. Definitions: relation, Cartesian product, attribute, domain, tuple. Relational algebra, operations. Potential, primary, alternative, natural, surrogate, complex keys.
• 3) SQL. DDL operations: CREATE, ALTER, DROP, DELETE.
• 4) SQL. DML operations: INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, SELECT.
• 5) SQL. SELECT: base syntax. FROM, WHERE, GROUP BY, HAVING, ORDER BY, LIMIT. Rules for using ORDER BY. Execution order.
• 6) SQL. JOIN operations. INNER, LEFT, RIGHT, FULL, CROSS. Using JOINs in SELECT.
• 7) Ternary logic. NULL values, calculations with NULLs.
• 8) SQL. SELECT with subqueries and CTEs. Difference between a subquery and a CTE. Syntax: WITH, AS.
• 9) SQL. Window functions. Difference between aggregating and window functions. Syntax: OVER, PARTITION BY, ORDER BY. 3 groups of window functions, examples.
• 10) Stages of database design. Crow's foot notation.
• 11) Normalization. 1st, 2nd and 3rd normal forms. Heath's theorem.
• 12) Versioning. SCD0-4. Advantages and disadvantages.
• 13) SQL. Views. Definition, syntax, usage.
• 14) SQL. Indexes. B-tree and Hash indexes. Complex, partial indexes. Conditions for applying indexes.
• 15) SQL. Query parsing and execution. Query plan.
• 16) SQL vs NoSQL databases. Comparison. Key-value stores, graph databases, document stores, column-oriented databases.

Basic questions

• Database and DBMS concepts
• Definitions: relation, domain, tuple, attribute, generalized Cartesian product, relation header, relation body
• Definitions of keys: potential (simple, composite), primary (natural, surrogate), alternative, external
• 5 types of JOIN
• List of DDL, DML, and DCL operators
• Basic syntax of a SELECT query
• SELECT query execution order
• What UNIQUE, NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY, FOREIGN KEY means
• one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many relationships
• List the three stages of database design
• Definition of a subquery
• 3 types of window functions
• Definition of a view
• Definition of an index
• Definition of a transaction

Major rules

• The project defense is oral and staged.
• DON’T use LLM for your rating tasks! The only exception is generating illustrative images and synthetic data.
• DON’T copy other people’s projects!