Final Exam Review

As a reminder, the final exam is comprehensive, the study topic guide below is broken into sections for 6-week, 12-week, and 16-week content, but all of the material from the class is can be considered fair topics for the final exam.

Recent topics from the course.

• Indexing
  • Hashing and btrees
  • Creating Indexes in MySQL
  • Calculating potential gains and losses (time) when using hashing
• Transactions
  • ACID
  • Statement and Transaction Level Consistency
  • Isolation, Locking, and Dangers
• Advanced Topics in data
  • Cleaning your data
  • Data Storage and RAID
  • Alternative Databases (Sqlite)
  • SQL Injections and Prepared Statements
  • Ethics and Data

Material from the 12 week portion of the course.

• Entity-Relationship (ER) Model
  • Entities, Attributes, Relatonships, Identifiers
  • Cardinality
  • Notation
  • ID-Dependant/ID-Independant Weak/Strong Relationships
  • Subtypes
  • Logical Design (converting to CREATE TABLE statements)
• Interacting with MySQL via Python and R
  • How our mydb.R and mydb.py files actually work (the steps inside)
  • Prepared Statements (%s, ?)
  • Loading data from CSVs into MySQL
• Data Cleaning
• SQL Views

Material from the 6 week portion of the course.

Remember topics from the previous midterm may appear on this exam as well, so remember to review the following as well.

• Practical Programming - You may be asked to write or interpret code
• Python Programming
• R Programming
• Subsetting various data types
• Structured Query Language (SQL) - You may be asked to write or interpret SQL
• Creating Tables via CREATE TABLE and the associated table structure
• Modifying TABLES via ALTER, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE
• Retrieving Data via SELECT
• Designing and Restructuring Tables - You may be asked about:
• Identifing Function Dependencies
• Identifing Possible Keys
• Normalizing Tables through BCNF

Reminders about "study sheets" during exams

For the final exam you are allowed to bring three double sided sheets, with the following reminders:

• Must be hand-written - No computer generated sheets, this is to help you practice the material.
• We will collect the sheet when you turn in the exam.
• If we see computer generated / printed out sheets we will take them from you during the exam!