Database Management:
    E-Business Systems Development

Unique Number: 03975
Professor: Prabhudev Konana
Office: CBA 3.24
Phone: 471-5219 (O)
E-mail: pkonana@mail.utexas.edu
Office hours: T TH 3.30pm-5.00pm and by appointment

Welcome to the MIS 373.1 online class! This class is designed to accomodate the remote learning needs of students and industry. All class lectures, handouts and practice quizzes can be accessed through this site. In addtion, this site features interactive demos, to delivery the interactive and hands-on appeal of courses conducted in class.

This course is designed to provide you the necessary skills and an understanding to design and develop mission-critical applications (including Web-based application). We will use Oracle DBMS (on Unix) as the platform to implement assignments and projects. The main emphasis in class is teaching concepts with some hands-on instructions. Which means, you have the responsibility to learn on your own some of the details of Oracle implementation. Learning to learn is the greatest skill for MIS professional! Frustration is part of the course (that is, you will have to think hard on how to solve some of the problems J). (Think this way, if you can breeze through the course then why take this course? You can as well learn in your free time or while watching TV). Your ability to comprehend and solve complex problems is what makes you successful.

In this class we will investigate what XML and JDBC are all about and what they can and cannot do. If appropriate XML authoring tools and necessary database-XML connectivity software are available, you will learn developing small applications in XML. Since these technologies are still evolving, there is some risk as to how much we can accomplish. But, surely we will cover these topics at a very high level.

At the end of the semester you should be thorough (or reasonably good) with database concepts (e.g., integrity constraints, Normalization, indexing), E-R modeling, SQL, PL/SQL (Oracle's Procedural language extension of SQL), triggers, Web-database connectivity, and data warehouse design. In particular, we will work on developing complex interactive Web applications within the Oracle environment. We will cover the various client and server side issues (like, optimizing communication needs, data validation, pitfalls, security) in building Web-based solutions. We will look at how cookies can be used in developing web applications. Nice techniques to link Excel, Web and database will be shown in class. Please note that this class is not about introducing the buzzwords; so assignments may (will) take time (depending on how much and how fast you understand some of the concepts and skills).

Note: The subject matter is technical and hands-on intensive. Someone not familiar with programming or had no programming experience will find this course difficult and time consuming. The content cannot be changed mid-way because some students do not like technical details or managerial issues. Therefore, please read the course schedule carefully and decide whether this course is for you or not. Several topics that will be discussed including XML are still evolving. Software and tools are not yet available. So, the later part of the class will be unstructured to some extent. Efforts will be made to arrange tutorials and other materials to learn these new technologies. However, there are risks in terms of learning and arranging software for these topics. If you expect structured material/tools/software before the classes begin then this class is not for you. Most importantly, the Oracle documentation on SQL and PL/SQL is over 1800 pages. It is impossible to cover even 10% in class. Therefore, you need to learn how to look through the documentation and find relevant pieces of information.