A First Course in Database Systems

Welcome to the home page for A First Course in Database systems, by Jeff Ullman, and Jennifer Widom.

See also the landing page for Database Systems: The Complete Book.

Special Opportunity: Prentice-Hall, the publisher of this book and Database Systems: The Complete Book, is making available a special edition of these books that include the Gradiance automated homeworks and SQL Labs. Instructors should read the Signup Information to get this service for your class.

Index

Note: this page includes links for all three editions of FCDB. Some of the links actually take you to the home page for DS:CB, or to a page devoted to the topic selected.

Sample Database Projects.
Solutions to selected exercises: Second Edition; First Edition.
Errata for All Editions.
Slides and Lecture Notes.
Oracle Guide.
Exams and Homework from Previous CS145's.
Material from the Second Edition Deleted from the Third
Course Materials From Elsewhere.
Book-Ordering Information.

About the Third Edition

Table of Contents and Sample Chapters

Table of Contents for the third edition.
Sample chapters in PDF: Chapter 1. Chapter 2.
The book has Demonstrated Appeal to Readers of All Ages.

Major Changes in the Third Edition

We begin with a discussion of relational design, rather than E/R design. There are a number of technical improvements to the discussion of functional and multivalued dependencies, including the synthesis algorithm for 3NF and the use of the "chase" algorithm to make inferences of dependencies.
We have added coverage of high-level design using UML.
Coverage of index selection and use of materialized views has been added.
There is new coverage of the database aspects of PHP.
There are two new chapters on XML-related material, including XML Schema, XPath, XQuery, and XSLT.
Certain material, especially OQL and recursive Datalog, has been deleted and moved On-Line.

Support Materials Available

The materials below are available for use by others. Instructors are welcome to use them in their own courses, download them to their own class' web site, or modify them to suit. However, you must acknowledge the source of the original and not attempt to place your own copyright on this material.

Note: If you are creating your own materials for a course based on the book and would like to share them with the world, we would be happy to create a link to them.

Projects

We have several complete CS145 Sample Projects available.

Solutions to Exercises

Because the Gradiance (GOAL) automatic homework system is now available, we are not updating the on-line solutions. Prentice-Hall is preparing a complete solution manual available to instructors only. However, we shall maintain solutions to the First and Second Editions of the book:

Errata

For the Third Edition

See The Errata Sheet for FCDB/3e.

For the Second Edition

The errata for the second edition are identical to those on pp. 1-502 of Database Systems: The Complete Book. The most recent errata for FCDB/2e are found in Errata for DS:CB, but you should also check First Errata Sheet for DS:CB and Second Errata Sheet for DS:CB.

For the First Edition

Our list is growing! Send us a correction to ullman aT gmail DoT com and see yourself acknowledged on the errata page.

Slides and Lecture Notes

Check out the most recent CS145 Slides and Notes.

Documentation for Oracle DMBS

The CS145 Oracle Guide.

Handouts

Here are CS145 Class Materials.

Materials from Second Edition Deleted in Third

Object-Oriented Query Languages (old Sections 4.1, 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3).
Recursive Datalog (old Section 10.3).

Also Check Out

Tim Finin's CMSC461 at University of Maryland, Baltimore County has some useful materials, such as an Oracle guide.
Alon Levy's CS444 at the Univ. of Washington.
Jagdish Gangolly's course on DB's for accounting at SUNY-Albany.
Fabrizio Riguzzi's Slides in Italian, based on the Complete Book.

Ordering Information

The Prentice-Hall Web Page for FCDB has further information.
The Amazon Page for the book.