Homework 5 -- Using Access

Preparation

MS Access is a very popular database program. Reference material on Access can be found in chapter 12 of our textbook, in the lab handouts for CSCI 107, and in numerous readily-available books. This is the sort of program a computer science major should be able to master on his/her own.

Within your Computer Science home directory create a protected subdirectory for this assignment by typing the following commands:

cd
mkdir -p csci/343/home05
chmod go-rx csci/343/home05

When you have finished creating your Access database, you will store it within this directory under the name “home05.mdb”.

Save the file home05.txt, a comma-delimited text file containing information about UNCA courses, onto your PC. Start up MicroSoft Access, create a database called home05.mdb, and import the text file you just downloaded into a table in your new database. You should get a table with eleven columns:

Department
Course number
Course section
Title
Instructor (mangled to protect the guilty)
Credit hours
Course ID
Meeting days
Start of meeting
End of meeting
Meeting room

Your job

First, work on your own. You may ask questions about Access of other students, but you may not copy or share databases. All keystrokes and mouse presses required to complete this assignment must be typed by you.

The bare minimum -- The C job

Fix up the database and add some queries and a report.

Assign reasonable field names and domains.
Design at least two interesting queries. The queries must generate vertical and horizontal views of the database.
Design a report.

The good citizen -- The B job

Normalize the database and add queries and a report. Normalizing the database can be a bit trickly. Do this by using queries to define views which can then be exported into the database.

Divide the one table into two. One for section, with course ID as the primary key, and the other for section meetings.
Design at least two interesting queries. The queries must generate vertical and horizontal selections of the table and at least one query must relate fields from both tables.
Design a useful report.

The guru -- The A job

Do all the requirements of the good citizen and then do more. Examples of more include:

improvements in the time fields,
queries involving times,
Visual Basic or Java (JDBC) interfaces to the database

Due dates and turning it in

When you have completed your database, FTP it into csci/343/home05/home05.mdb on your CSCI home directory. At noon on Monday, 3 May, a script will be run to copy your database onto my PC.

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