April 20
Questions about term project or anything so far?
One more round of the graph algorithms we talked about Tuesday ...
SQL and Relational Databases
For our last topic of the semester, I'd like to look at SQL.
There is more to know about this stuff than we can cover in a week
and a half, so this will be just the tip of the iceberg. But
since data structures are a key part of algorithms and their
implementations, and SQL is one of the dominant paradigms
in the real world of storing large amounts of diverse data,
I think it's worth jumping in.
This topic is not explained well in a single source that I am aware of.
Most tutorials you'll find by googling these terms cover various details
without really explaining the big picture.
Rather than writing a textbook myself, I will walk you through
the pieces, invite you to explore the topic though the links
below (or your own googling), and then next week we'll do some
practical examples.
database resources
examples - a good place to start, actually
what is a "relational database" : tables and the connections between them
SQL - "Structured Query Language" - a programming language that let you interact with relational databases
SQLite (a relatively easy to install and use open source source engine)
