Syllabus: Fall 2025		Credit hours: 3
Class times: 9:30am – 10:45am, TuTh		Classroom: Witmer Hall 209
Class # (on-campus: 520-01): 19267		Class # (on-line: 520-02): 19268
Instructor: Wen-Chen Hu   (my teaching philosophy)		Office: Upson II 366K
: https://und.zoom.us/j/2489867333		Email: wenchen@cs.und.edu
Office hours: 2:30pm – 4:30pm, MoWeFr
Prerequisites: DATA/EECS 501 Computing Foundations I, DATA/EECS 502 Computing Foundations II, and DATA/EECS 503 Mathematics for Computing, or Permission of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Synchronous class delivery: The class lectures will be delivered synchronously via https://und.zoom.us/j/2489867333, and the Zoom video will be posted on the Blackboard afterwards. Students can watch the video clips anytime they want.
Lecture notes: No textbook will be used. Instead award-winning, interactive, informative, and practical lecture notes (based on books, papers, online documents, and user manuals) and detailed and precise class instructions will be provided. Collectively, the lecture notes and instructions are more like a small book, which supplies much more information than regular notes do and makes the subject studies much easier. Students will not have problem learning the subjects or taking the exams after studying them and doing programming exercises.

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Grading: Grade information Programming exercises Programming exercise guidelines Examination guidelines

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Announcements:

• Updated constantly: Class notes


• Tuesday, November 18: Exam II to be held at 6:30pm–8:30pm (CST) for everyone
• Thursday, November 06: Exam II Question Distribution posted
• Thursday, December 04: Programming Exercise II due
• Thursday, October 02: Programming Exercise II posted
• Tuesday, October 07: Exam I to be held at 6:30pm–8:30pm (CST) for everyone
• Monday, September 29: Exam I Question Distribution posted
• Thursday, October 02 (soft): Programming Exercise I due
• Tuesday, August 26: Programming Exercise I posted
• Tuesday, August 26: Check a simple CGI test page at
  
      A CGI Test Page
  
  If you follow it very carefully, you should be able to make the CGI scripts work.
• Tuesday, August 26: To extend the connection time of SQL Developer, use the following method:
  
  You could turn DBMS output (like collection types) on and setting the polling frequency (refresh) to once every 2 minutes or so by selecting the following SQL Developer options:

  Reports ⇒ Data Dictionary Reports ⇒ All Objects ⇒ Collection Types ⇒
        
  Select Connection ⇒ Enter Bind Values ⇒ Refresh ⇒ 120

• Tuesday, August 26: Execute the following command at the server undcemcs02 for the first time and only time. Otherwise, your CGI scripts will not work.
  
  
  shell⯈ chcon -R -t httpd_sys_script_exec_t /home/USER.ID/public_html 
  
  Swap out “USER.ID” with your login name:
  
  
  shell⯈ chcon -R -t httpd_sys_script_exec_t /home/first.lastname/public_html 
  
  
• Tuesday, August 26: Edit your .bash_profile file at the server undcemcs02.und.edu by using the following command (you can use any other editor, not just emacs) for the first and only time:
  
  
  shell⯈ emacs ~/.bash_profile 
  
  where the ~/.bash_profile file can be found from here and is the personal initialization file, executed for login shells.


• Monday, August 25: Register this course via Course Registration.

According to Google, Top-10 popular computer careers (05/18/2025) are listed as follows:

Software engineer  Web developer   (Experienced) Data scientist  Information security analyst Network administrator  Database administrator/developer  Computer system analyst IT manager Business intelligence analyst DevOps engineer

However, without a proven track record, a computer/data-science graduate may face one of the highest unemployment rates (6.1%) because companies want employees to start contributing immediately according to Newsweek (05/24/2025). Computer/data science is different from many other disciplines (like electrical engineering). It is more like a professional school (such as culinary schools), which emphasizes practical works instead of subject studies. There are three kinds of computing personnel:

• Developers:
  
  
  • Positions (plenty): Developers of front-end and back-end web pages, mobile apps, and all kinds of software
  • Skills (more stable): Programming languages (such as C++ and Java), web programming, mobile app development, data processing and management including databases, and data structures & algorithms


• Practitioners:
  
  
  • Positions (not many): Experienced personnel like data scientists, database or system administrators, security analysts, and network architects (more applications & configuration and less development)
  • Skills (based on the needs of companies): Databases, data warehousing, data lake, Hadoop, MapReduce, Linux, SPSS, SAS, Cogno, Matlab, Tableau, etc.


• Researchers:
  
  
  • Industrial positions (few and based on the needs of corporations): High quality personnel required for the advanced areas like artificial intelligence, security, computer vision, autonomous driving, and speech recognition
  • Academic positions/trends (few and changed according to the government policies): ❓ ⇐ artificial intelligence ⇐ big data ⇐ high-performance computing ⇐ security ⇐ (mobile) networks

Unless you have an impressive resume or a strong connection, practicing tens or hundreds of questions posted at the LeetCode is a must in order to secure a job at corporations (like Google and Facebook). Otherwise, your chance of answering the questions correctly is low because of their high difficulty and time constraint. In addition, you need to create LinkedIn pages to show your achievements, and may consider uploading your projects to the GitHub to showcase them.

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Remark I: Definitions, terminologies, and theories will be discussed minimally in this course. Instead practical works and programming knowledge will be emphasized and enforced. The old technology, CGI (Common Gateway Interface), will be used to connect the Web to JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) programs because of the limited resources provided by the CEM, but CGI has no problem implementing the features used by other technologies (like ASP.NET or PHP). Also, the focus of this course is on databases, instead of Web-database connection.

Remark II: Database technologies like programming languages have no breakthroughs for years, so old, new, these, or those textbooks are pretty much the same. In other words, not much database research is left to do. However, databases are still a useful tool for other research areas like data science including data (web) mining and discovery, information retrieval, and mobile data management (e.g., location-based services). Don’t mention databases are a must tool for many applications such as e/m-commerce sites and IT systems.

Remark III: Web, mobile, and database programming is a must for IT developers, and the only effective way to learn software development is practicing, instead of studying concepts or writing some testing programs.

No pain, no gain 😂

Remark IV: According to a study, students in computer courses learn much more by building large-scale exercises instead of many small-scale test programs, which give fragmented knowledge contrary to solid understanding of the system.

Remark V: Remote work is a trend for IT workers. This course also allows you to learn how to do it by using the VPN (virtual private networks) to connect to our Linux server undcemcs02.und.edu, and having the exercises set up at the server and be accessed from the clients.

Instructor’s qualification: The instructor’s PhD dissertation is titled “An image database system based on a linear skeleton representation,” which includes a database-driven web system by using Perl and Sybase in 1997, when not many people were familiar with the Web. In fact, all his research to date uses or relates to databases, but not tries to build or enhance a DBMS (database management system). In addition, he is familiar with many kinds of databases like Oracle, MySQL, Google Firebase, SQLite, Microsoft SQL Server & Access, Sybase, and MongoDB.

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University of North Dakota Course Descriptions (DATA 520) —
An introduction to the principles of database design and management. Topics include query optimization, procedural extension of query languages, runtime error handling, normalization techniques, data warehousing, and NoSQL.

Database Outline —
A collection of information organized in such a way that a computer program can quickly select desired pieces of data. To access information in a database, you need a database management system (DBMS), which is a collection of programs that enables you to enter, organize, and select data in a database.

A System Structure of a Generic Internet/Mobile-Enabled Database System —

An Internet-Enabled and Mobile Database Course Sequence —
This is part of an Internet/mobile-enabled database course sequence offered by me:

CSCI 399 .NET and World Wide Web Programming
⇓
CSCI 457 Electronic and Mobile Commerce Systems
⇓
DATA 520 Databases
⇓
CSCI 513 Advanced Database Systems
⇓
CSCI 515 Data Engineering and Management
⇓
DATA 525 Data Engineering and Mining

The following platforms, software, and tools used in these courses greatly help students land a decent job:

• CSCI 399 (.NET and World Wide Web Programming) to build database-driven websites by using
  
  
  • Microsoft SQL Server database,
  • Microsoft ASP.NET,
  • Microsoft C#,
  • Microsoft .NET, and
  • Microsoft Visual Studio.


• CSCI 457 (Electronic and Mobile Commerce Systems) to build electronic and mobile commerce systems by using
  
  
  • Android programming,
  • Android-server-database connection,
  • (L) Linux operating system,
  • (A) Apache web server,
  • (M) MySQL database, and
  • (P) PHP.


• DATA 520 (Databases) to build Internet-enabled database systems by using
  
  
  • Client/web-server-database connection,
  • JDBC (Java Database Connectivity),
  • Oracle database, and
  • Relational database design and SQL.


• CSCI 513 (Advanced Database Systems) to build Internet-enabled and embedded database systems by using
  
  
  • Android programming,
  • Android SQLite embedded database,
  • JDBC (Java Database Connectivity),
  • Object-relational SQL and PL/SQL, and
  • Oracle (an object-relational database).


• CSCI 515 (Data Engineering and Management) to build location-based services and data-mining systems to discover knowledge from a large set of data by using
  
  
  • Android programming,
  • Android Google APIs and Firebase database,
  • Data mining and knowledge discovery,
  • Information retrieval,
  • Location-based services, and
  • Smartphones and mobile handheld devices.


• DATA 525 (Data Engineering and Mining) to build Internet-enabled data-mining systems to discover knowledge from a large set of data by using
  
  
  • Data mining and knowledge discovery,
  • Internet-enabled Firebase database,
  • Information retrieval, and
  • Internet-enabled TensorFlow.