Non-Graded Exercises/Examples

This page provides exercises and examples for you to try. Since you'll learn the most in this class by doing rather than watching, I urge you to try as many of these as possible. As an incentive, each exam will have at least one question that is isomorphic (i.e., same form, but possibly different variable names) to a question in the homework, tutorials, clicker questions, or practice exercises.

The exercise/examples here take one of two forms: 1. sample questions and answers or 2. suggested questions from the book. You can find a solution set to most of the odd numbered exercises here. All suggested questions from the book have at least partial answers in the above PDF file.

Practice Exams

Questions on transactions and database crash/recovery are no longer part of this course and are now covered in CPSC 404 instead.

Old Sample Midterm 1s:
- Practice test 1 & Answers
- Practice test 2 & Answers
- Practice test 3 & answers
- Practice test 4 & answers
- Practice test 5 & answers
- Practice test 6 & answers
- Practice test 7 & answers
- Practice test 8 & answers and common mistakes
Sample Midterms from terms with only one midterm:
- Practice test 9 & answers
Old Sample Midterm 2s:
Sample Final

Database Background (Chapter 1)

Database Design (Chapters 2 & 3)

DB Design Set
Recommended questions from the book:
- 2.1
- 2.3
- 2.7
- 3.1
- 3.3
- 3.3
- 3.5
- 3.7
- 3.11
- 3.13
- 3.15
- 3.17
Practice on ER to relational questions and answsers
Additional E/R practice: questions and answers
Additional ER to Relational practice: questions and answers

Normal Forms and Functional Dependencies

Recommended exercises from the book. Where the question calls for decomposition into 3NF, try this as well, but the book will not provide solutions for this case.

19.1
19.3
19.5
19.7: For (c) ignore when it says there's no lossless BCNF decomposition - this refers to the dependencies that 3NF would keep that BCNF would not.
19.13 - for part 1, ignore the multi-valued dependency part of the question

Additional sample questions and answers

Formal Relational Languages -
(Relational Algebra)

Suggested exercises from the book: please note that you are only responsible for the relational algebra, not the calculi.
- 4.1
- 4.3
- 4.5
Relational Algebra (RA) Examples

SQL

The practice movie, sailor, and student data set from class along with instructions on how to use it can be found here

Suggested exercises from the book
- 5.1
- 5.3
- 5.5
- 5.7
- 5.9
SQL Examples 1 (sample data)
SQL Examples 2 (sample data)
SQL Examples 3 (sample data)

Datalog

Suggested exercises from the book:
- 24.1 parts 1, 3, 4, 5, 7 (answers since they're not in the back of the book. Note that I don't care about the syntax of the times.)
For more sample questions + solutions see the tutorial page.

XML

Suggested exercises from the book:
- 7.1 (part 4 only)
- 27.7 parts 1 and 2 only. Note: there's no answer in the back of the book for this. Feel free to post to Connect or send e-mail if you'd like your answer looked over.