Introduction to the Course

Welcome to EBIS 3003 - Database Management!

This course is for second year EBIS students at BNU-HKBU UIC. I also aim to provide a guideline and staples for future EBIS curriculum. Throughout this course, students will learn how database management systems can help structure, restructure, and use big and small data from business processes to improve business intelligence, analytics, and user interface (UI), and ultimately achieve higher business goals.

You will learn all these through practice and experience: Students will start using database management software, MySQL to be particular, and programming language that is popularly used to develop web applications, Python in this case, from day one. At the end of the semester, students are expected to understand how paradigms for database management has changed upon the advent of big data, data mining, and data science, and how these change calls for alternative data base management systems, which leads us to touch upon MongoDB as an example although we are not going too deeply into this topic. We will often refer to what you learned from Management Information Systems (BUS 4023) class last semester. If students studied the database chapter well for BUS 4023, they should be familiar with the basic ideas discussed in this class. I am sure that many of the concepts learnt in the MIS class sounded abstract and probably practically useless. They are not! But I'm sympathetic to you as well because it is hard to feel the practical use of 'concepts' before actually using them. Thus, our approach will be fully hands-on, practice-first, and learning-by-doing.

As another motivational anecdote, I wanted to share an experience from one of my friends. She was one of my fellow PhD students at Michigan State University a few years back, and left for a Facebook intern position. After a full-time position at Facebook as a researcher, now she works at AirBnB now. After her first internship period, she came back to Michigan to share her internship experience (I was a firs-year baby PhD student). One interesting aspect of her experience was that 80% of her job as a researcher at Facebook, one of the most successful IT company in the world, was tweaking data to take averages using database management software. This is important. Even in the hottest IT company in the world that takes billion of dollars out of super complicated structured/unstructured data, the biggest weapon they have is the database management systems.

Another thing you should understand is that what you will learn from this class is that simple. We will just learn some efficient ways of storing data in table's' (or probably in something other than tables. we will talk about this later) with tools that are a little better then Microsoft Excel, and taking average, standard errors, and so on. This is absolutely it for this course. If you become a data expert, you might do a bit more than taking average, of course. But you should note that all the fancy tools, such as neural network, time-series modeling, clustering, etc., are conducted in coordination with some database management systems. We will touch upon this later in this course.

Another thing you should note is that we need some system that is a little better than Microsoft Excel because probably your data are so dirty, particularly when you have what is often called 'big data' (another topic). That said, remember, all you will learn is very simple; barely more than designing, using, manipulating, merging tables.

Experiential Approach

Although we will have some practical issues due to the unfortunate situation we cannot meet in person and work together, my approach to this class is 100% hands-on, meaning that we will focus more on *using* databases than *understanding* them. To be more specific, we start using database BEFORE learning the theory! The philosophy behind this approach is NOT to undervalue theories. This is important. Theories are important, will be used in practice to design and use database management systems, and first of all, you will see them on the exam! a.k.a READ THE TEXTBOOK AND THE SLIDES! My hope is, rather, that students would see the values of the theories more easily when they have some experience that gives them some sense how they can be useful. My personal experience is that this *sense of usefulness* was the best way of motivating yourself to learn something. Thus, I encourage students to attend to see in what sense using database management systems than using conventional file-storage systems, as they work with the hands-on practice.

Focused experience - donorschoose.org

Hands-on experience is great, but I also understand that it is difficult to find your own application as a second-year undergraduate student. Thus, here I will give you a broad goal that you should achieve using the tools you will learn from this course. The goal is improving a crowdfunding website, called donorschoose.org. You might ask: what's crowdfuning? what's donorschoose.org? I will explain in the next section.