Using a Semi-Realistic Database to Support a Database Course

1. INTRODUCTION A common problem for university relational database courses is to construct effective databases for instructions and assignments. Limited by spaces and with the focus to provide easy-to-understand examples on core concepts, database textbooks usually contain highly simplified databases which are regarded by many as 'toy' databases (Elmasri and Navathe, 2010; Gillenson, 2011; Hoffer, Ramesh and Topi, 2013; Jukic, Vrbsky and Nestorov, 2013; Pratt and Adamski, 2011; Rob and Coronel, 2007; Watson 2005). Although effective in illustrating underlying principles, these simple examples do not reflect the complexity and practical considerations that are common and crucial in real-world problems. They would "under no circumstance prepare the students for the true feel and experience of the massive data sets and the database problems they will need to cope with once they graduate and work in the real world" (Jukic and Gray 2008). However, using real-world production databases to teach database concepts is also not without challenges. Their intricate domain constraints, intrinsic complexity, and extensive practical considerations of technical, managerial, and organizational issues create a significant barrier for students to understand the problem. Their complexity can obscure the underlying principles and hinder effective learning, especially for novices. Students need to overcome a steep learning curve before being able to work on examples and assignments based on them. Thus, a well-designed 'semi-realistic' database with the right balance of complexity represents an appropriate compromise. It can allow students to quickly practice relational theory and techniques, while working in an environment resembling their future professional careers. This paper describes our five-semester experience in using Sakila, a well-designed and highly available semi-realistic database provided by MySQL, to support instructions and multiple assignments in a graduate database course. It describes a set of 128 Sakila-based problems we developed in diverse topics in databases. They can selectively be used to support different database courses. Our surveys show that this semi-realistic approach is both promising and effective. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides the background literature research. Section 3 describes Sakila and the database course. Section 4 describes the set of course materials with examples. Section 5 discusses our learned experience based on the survey results of studying the effectiveness of using such a semi-realistic database. We draw our conclusions in Section 6. 2. BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE RESEARCH Many IS educators have the impression that the vast majority of database examples and assignments used in database textbooks and courses tend to be highly simplified. This simplified approach helps to minimize complexity and highlight core principles to students. To evaluate the validity of this impression, we studied the Teradata University Network, a popular resource for supporting various kinds of database courses for both faculty members and students (Teradata University Network, 2013). It provides the Teradata Database DBMS, which is accessible via Teradata SQL Assistant through the Web (Jukic and Gray, 2008). Teradata Database DBMS contains a collection of databases used in various popular DBMS textbooks. We analyzed all textbook databases through Teradata SQL Assistant. In the collection, there are databases with large amount of overlapping schema and data. When given a choice, we selected the versions with the larger sizes. We obtained and analyzed information on 13 databases from the most recent versions of six textbooks (Gillenson, 2011; Hoffer, Ramesh and Topi, 2013; Jukic, Vrbsky and Nestorov, 2013; Pratt and Adamski, 2004; Rob and Coronel, 2007; Watson 2005). Table 1 contains the result. Note that the database db_watson contains all databases used in Watson (2005). …