Referring to the modeling capability, the course introduces two models widely adopted to represent databases, the Relational model and the Entity relationship model. The Relational model is used by the majority of software systems that manage databases, while the Entity relationship model, that is provided of an user friendly diagrammatic representation, is adopted in the early stage of the database design process.

Referring to the design capability, the database design process starts usually with a natural language or pictorial description of user requirements; it is worthwhile to represent initially such description using the Entity Relationship model, that is understandable by users, and provides a rich set of semantic characteristics of data. The result of the design activity at this stage is a database schema. After that, the design can proceed translating the Entity Relationship schema into a logical schema in the relational model. Such translation has to be performed using several practical rules that have the goal to optimize the relational schema w.r.t. queries and transactions performed by users. Once obtained the logical schema, one can add to relations (last step) data that represent, in our case, the students, courses and exams.

The course assumes you are familiar with basic mathematical concepts such as set, subset, table, function, and domain of a function.