Download FinalExamReview

CSCE4350,Fall 2012, Final Review
1. What is an index? What is the maintenance cost of an index?
2. What is a primary index? What is a secondary index?
3. What is a dense index? What is a sparse index?
4. What is a B+ tree index? What are the main properties of B+ tree?
5. How to build a B+ tree given a sequence of search keys?
6. What are the benefits of having indexes on attributes of tables?
7. What are the overhead of having an index?
8. How to choose which attribute(s) to build an index?
9. Usually, how many single attribute ordered index can you build on a table?
10. What are the advantages of B+ tree index compared with the traditional indexes?
11. What is a bitmap index? When are bitmap indexes useful?
12. What are the costs in terms of number of IOs to locate a record with or without indexing?
13. What is query processing? How query cost is measured?
14. What information does a query optimizer use to come up with query plan?
15. What is ACID property?
16. What are concurrent transactions? What are the benefits of concurrent control?
17. What is dirty read?
18. What is a transaction?
19. What is a schedule?
20. What is a conflict serializable schedule? Given a schedule, be able to tell if the schedule
is conflict serializable by drawing a precedence graph.
21. Given a schedule, know if the schedule confirms to two phase locking protocol.
22. What is two-phase locking? Is two phase locking deadlock free?
23. What are the main features of object relational databases?
24. Discuss why user defined types are useful and why traditional relational database do not
provide adequate support for some applications. List several applications and elaborate
the need of having user defined data types.
25. Define using examples the following concepts in XML: tag, element, attribute, root
element, name space.
26. XML is self describing. What are the advantages and disadvantages of “self describing”?
27. What are the two ways to specify XML document structure?
28. Given a DTD, write an XML documents conforming to the DTD. (The number of some
elements may be specified as well).
29. What are the differences of DTD and XML schema?
30. Given a simple XML document segments and an xpath expression, be able to identify
the segments of the XML selected by the xpath expression.
31. What is a data warehouse? What is a star schema?
32. What are the difference between OLAP and OLTP?
33. Measurements on fact table in star schema can be classified into distributive, algebraic,
and holistic. What do they mean? Why it is useful to know the category of a
measurement in data warehouse? Given a measurement, e.g. average, be able to tell if
it is distributive, algebraic, or holistic.
34. What are the main patterns in data mining?