CS145 - Spring 2004
Introduction to Databases

Project Part 0: Trivial Oracle Warm-Up
Due Thursday April 22

Submission: Programming work is submitted electronically and must be submitted by Thursday at 11:59 PM. Programming work submitted after the deadline but less than 24 hours late (i.e., by Friday 11:59 PM) will be accepted but penalized 10%, and programming work submitted more than 24 hours but less than 48 hours late (i.e., by Saturday 11:59 PM) will be penalized 30%. No programming work will be accepted more than 48 hours late.
For emergencies: Since emergencies do arise, each student is allowed a total of four unpenalized late days (four periods up to 24 hours each) for programming work together with challenge problems, although no single assignment may be more than two days late. See the Assigned Work page for more information.
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.

The Assignment

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 web site. Log into Oracle through your Leland account as described in the document, 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 Project Support Materials page on the course web site. 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.

Having Trouble?

If you run into difficulties, before contacting the course staff please consult the Project Part 0 FAQ Page. We will keep it up-to-date with answers to common questions.

What to Submit

Prepare a "submission directory" on one of the Leland machines. For Part 0 of the project this directory should contain just a single text file called README.txt. The contents of this file should be the transcript described in Step 3 (including at lest one SQL query on the Courses table). From this submission directory, execute the script:

  /afs/ir/class/cs145/bin/submit-project

You may resubmit as many times as you like, however only the latest submission and timestamp are saved, and those are what we will use for grading your work and determining late penalties. Submissions via email will not be accepted.