BCS THE CHARTERED INSTITUTE FOR IT BCS HIGHER EDUCATION QUALIFICATIONS BCS Level 6 Professional Graduate Diploma in IT ADVANCED

DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Wednesday 28th September 2011 - Morning Answer any THREE questions out of FIVE. All questions carry equal marks. Time: THREE hours Answer any Section A questions you attempt in Answer Book A Answer any Section B questions you attempt in Answer Book B
The marks given in brackets are indicative of the weight given to each part of the question.

Calculator are NOT allowed in this examination.

Section A Answer Section A questions in Answer Book A

A1.

a)

What XML technology can do in web services with examples? (10 marks) What is XQuery language doing for XML documents? (5 marks)

b)

c)

What is a native XML database? Give an example and its DTD or schema. (10 marks)

A2.

a)

What is relational algebra? (5 marks)

b)

Convert the following SQL code into relational algebra using the tables provided below (10 marks) Course
CNO C1 C2 C3 CNAME Computing Business Electronics Qualification HND BSC MEng

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Module
MNO M1 M2 M3 M4 M5 MNAME Credits Math Analysis Database Programming UML 10 20 20 20 10

Exam
MNO SNO S5 S1 S3 S2 M1 M2 M3 M2 80 50 70 40 Mark

Student
SNO SNAME S3 S1 S2 S5 Nightingale Curie Gabriel Assessment Age 20 19 21 22 C1 C2 C3 C2 CNO

select Mname, Sname from Course, Student, Module, Exam where Qualification = "BSC" and Course.Cno=Student.Cno and Module.Mno=Exam.Mno

and Student.Sno=Exam.Sno
c) Discuss the differences if using difference approaches during optimisation processes. (10 marks)

A3.

A large multinational company sells products over the WWW using standard e-commerce software. Orders are processed by a centralised DBMS server situated at the company HQ. The company has branches located throughout the world that also access the centralised DBMS server over the WWW. Transaction volumes can be (mainly orders for products) as many as 20 orders per second at peak times on the central server. a) Give a definition of the term high data integrity in the context of the database application described above and describe the trade offs needed to achieve high data integrity. (7 marks) Describe the relationship between the concept and the technology for each of the following: i) ii) database mirroring (technology) and disaster recovery (concept). data replication (technology) and fault tolerance (concept). (8 marks) c) Discuss critically the benefits and drawbacks of using either database mirroring or data replication in the application described above. Include in your answer the trade-offs that each technology needs to make in order to achieve high data integrity and high transaction volumes. (10 marks)

b)

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Section B Answer Section B questions in Answer Book B

B4.

A health centre is characterised by the following processes: Patients go to doctors. Patients have a home address (city, country). Likewise doctors have a work address. Patients have either a private or public insurance. Furthermore, patients have an age. Doctors keep records for all their patients. These records keep information of the disease that a patient has and the data and type of treatment. Furthermore, the patient record keeps information on whether each application of the treatment is effective (score from 1 to 6; 6 is good) and whether there were any side effects (score from 1 to 6; 6 = no side effects). A treatment can either be a certain medication (e.g. Aspirin, Placebo,) or surgery (e.g. heart surgery, arthroscopy,). Each treatment has a cost for private patients and for public patients. For example, heart surgery costs 50000 for private patients and 20000 for public patients. Develop a star schema for a data warehouse for the above health centre. Give the keys and (non trivial) functional dependencies of all tables. (10 marks) State which tables are fact tables; which tables are dimension tables? What are the measures of the fact tables? (5 marks) Show that the star scheme you designed in the above question is modelled so that it can answer the following types of queries efficiently: Give the percentage of patients who go to the doctors in their home town. Give the top 10 diseases by the cost of their treatment. For each disease, give the most effective (on average) treatment. (10 marks)

a)

b)

c)

B5.

a)

Convert the following relational database tables to the equivalent object oriented conceptual representation, explaining each stage of your conversion. (10 marks)

The RRE Trucking company database includes three tables. TRUCK table

T_NUM BASE_NUM TYPE_NUM T_MILES T_BOUGHT T_SERIAL# 1001 501 1 59002.7 08/11/90 AA-12523341-W11 1002 502 2 64523.8 08/11/90 AA-12523341-W11 1003 501 2 32116.6 29/09/91 AC-21367888-Q12 1004 501 2 3256.9 14/01/92 AC-21367888-Q12 BASE table BASE_NUM BASE_CITY BASE_STATE BASE_PHONE BASE_MGR 501 Mufreesboro TN 615-893-1234 J.W.Gallager 502 Lexington KY 615-342-8992 G.E. Calero TYPE table TYPE-NUM TYPE_DESCR 1 Single-box, double axle 2 Tandem trailer, single axle
b) Using the above tables as a source of information: i) Deduce the implied business rules for the relationships. (5 marks) Choose the most appropriate type of participation constraints of the relationships (either mandatory or optional) implied in the above tables. Explain the selected choices. (5 marks)

ii)

c)

Using the results of part b i) and b ii) above, develop the conceptual object database model. (5 marks)

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** END OF EXAM **