CS145 - Spring 2003
Introduction to Databases

Part 0: Trivial Oracle Warm-Up -- Due Thursday April 24

Programming work: Programming work will be submitted electronically (for both on-campus and SCPD students), and must be submitted by Thursday at 11:59pm. Programming work submitted after the deadline but less than 24 hours late (i.e., by Friday 11:59pm) will be accepted but penalized 10%, and programming work submitted more than 24 hours but less than 48 hours late (i.e., by Saturday 11:59pm) will be penalized 30%. No programming work will be accepted more than 48 hours late.
For emergencies: Since emergencies do arise, each student is allocated four "chits" for turning in work with no penalty. Please see the Late Policy on the Assigned Work page for a detailed description of chits.
Honor Code reminder: For more detailed discussion of the Stanford Honor Code as it pertains to CS145, please see the Assigned Work page under Honor Code. In summary: You must indicate on your written and programming assignments any assistance (human or otherwise) that you received. Any assistance received that is not given proper citation will be considered a violation of the Honor Code. In any event, you are responsible for understanding and being able to explain on your own all material that you submit.
Reminder: Projects must be completed individually.

Scope

If you find this first part of the project a snap, you're not overlooking something, and don't worry - it will get much more interesting as time goes by. The primary purpose of this first "warm-up" part is for us to provide you with a whole bunch of basic information, and to get everyone up-to-speed on our computing systems and Oracle. With that said, please don't start at the last minute - as with all programming and systems work, everything takes a bit of time, and unforeseen snafus do crop up. In this portion of the project you will experiment with Oracle's sqlplus command-line interface and its bulk loader. You will create a database table to contain information about Stanford courses, load the table with a small amount of data we are providing, and run a few commands to get familiar with Oracle.

Step 0: Read the document Getting Started With Oracle, available through the Project Support Materials page on the course website. If you filled out our course registration form by the deadline then your Oracle account has been created. Log into Oracle, change your password, try some of the examples in the document, and experiment with the help command.
Step 1: Read the document Using the Oracle Bulk Loader, available through the course Web site Project page. Copy the Oracle load file /usr/class/cs145/sample_data/Courses.txt into your own filespace. Based on this load file, create a table called Courses in Oracle into which you will load the data. The schema you should use for the table is:
```
  Courses(course CHAR(9), units INT, title CHAR(32))
```
Load the data file into your Oracle table.
Step 2: Run the sqlplus "describe" command on your Courses table: type "describe Courses;". Also run at least one SQL query on your Courses table through sqlplus. The query "select * from Courses;" is a popular option. Feel free to experiment with more interesting queries.
Step 3: Create a transcript that shows the successful creation and loading of your Courses table, as well as the "describe" command and execution of at least one query. Information on creating transcripts is provided in the Getting Started With Oracle document under Recording Your Session.

What to submit

Prepare a "submission directory" on one of the Leland machines that contains a text file called README. The contents of this file will be the transcript described in Step 3 (including at lest one SQL query on the Courses table). From this submission directory, execute the command

/usr/class/cs145/bin/submit

Follow the instructions exactly. If you must resubmit, run the command

/usr/class/cs145/bin/submit -replace

If you have any problems, please send mail to cs145@cs.stanford.edu.