Midterm Exam Review Sheet

General Information

The midterm will be open notes, and have a time limit of 75 minutes. Most of it will be answered on the exam paper itself, though one section will ask you to use the computer.

Along with your notes and readings, review the kinds of questions asked on the assignments. 
Contact me if you have a question about any topic or posted solution.

What to Expect. There is usually a section of short answer (true/false, multiple choice, and one liners), a section of short answer questions on main concepts and coding in SQL,  a section that requires evaluating expressions and problems where you'll write SQL or come up with a sketch of the results of short SQL queries.

Likely Exam Topics

Structured Query Language.  This material will be based on our work in class, the assignments, and readings linked from the Class Schedule page and the assignments.

• The structure of the more common query statements
• Review the tutorial and other readings for information on select queries: tutorial
• Data types we've used like INT, difference between CHAR(30) and VARCHAR(30),  AUTO_INCREMENT, etc.
• Table structuring functions like CREATE, DESCRIBE, INSERT INTO, and so on.
• Be able to properly evaluate expressions and the use of if statements.
• Different ways to specify conditions in the WHERE clause (use of LIKE with pattern matching, for example)
• Using aggregate functions with GROUP BY, when to use HAVING, etc.
• All SQL built-in functions used in queries so far are fair game, but focus on the ones used most often.

On the exam I'll ask you to use the same basic structure as in the on-line notes so that queries are easy to read:

SELECT name, address, count(*)
FROM neighbors
WHERE LEFT(name) != 'Z'
ORDER BY name

However SQL keywords are not required to be ALL CAPS, use your discretion.

SQL and Database terms and concepts

• client-server architecture & what runs where on the web
• uses of primary keys
• uses of foreign keys
• normalization (at least 1NF)

HTML.  Decided against covering HTML on this exam.

History.  The little bit of history covered was origins of hypertext, relational databases, SQL, and the first Web technologies.

You should know about Command Line...eventually

There may not be any questions specifically about these commands, but you may need to use them.

Unix Commands:
     ls CS284
     ls ~/html/CS284
     cd
     cp
     pwd
     mkdir

Directory navigation (as a tree) using 'special' symbols:
     *
     .
     ..