Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
—Bruce Lee

Course Database Foundations

Dear student, welcome to the site belonging to the ‘Database Foundations’ course of the Applied Computer Science program at UCLL.

Toledo forms the basis and starting point of this course. Communication, additional information specific to distance or day courses, assignments, etc. can be found in the Toledo course.

This course text has students studying the Applied Computer Science program in distance learning as its first target audience. They have to make do without real classes.

Day students will also use this course text. Of course, they do have about 40 class hours on campus, leading to a different way of interacting with this text.

This site contains two major sections:

This introductory course is limited to the basics, the ‘foundations’. After all, there should be plenty of learning left for the follow-up courses!

The learning path outlines the order in which you would best process the different sections.

This info icon points to a text with some additional information.

Please read this type of box very carefully because we know from experience that students often go wrong at this point. Sometimes we also guide you toward making an error for didactic reasons. So if something goes wrong unexpectedly, read a few lines further in the text. Often, the next paragraph with "However, you get an error message because ...".

The site has limited responsiveness and should provide a fairly good experience. But it goes without saying that a slightly larger screen is more convenient than reading everything on a smartphone. The line length was limited so that the text is easy to read.

Some students asked for a paper copy. You can print the pages, but of course you lose all dynamic elements (links, solutions, ...). If you want to print everything anyway, maybe make sure the solutions are displayed first, so that they are also printed.

The most important verb in this text is ‘do’. The only way to master this is to go through the roadmaps, do the exercises, work with code and draw models. Certain exercises are picked up again at a later time, so when you do the exercises, make sure to save your results.

Do-things can be recognised by this icon. Complete the exercise or follow the step-by-step plan to put it into practice!

A lot of hard work went into this site. The authors thank colleagues Bram and Rudi for thorough proofreading and many suggestions. Still, there is an opportunity it is certain that there is room for improvement. If you find typos, odd sentence structures, missing or unclear pieces, please let us know at jan [dot] vanhee [at] ucll [dot] be. We welcome all constructive feedback so that we can continue improving this course site. If you like it, you can of course also let us know 😀.

For those interested: this site is hand-coded in HTML, CSS and JS and uses the Static Site Generator Astro.

Steven Engels & Jan Van Hee, September 2023