Assignment 3 Clarifications and Corrections

Check this page regularly for any hints, clarifications or corrections related to Assignment 3

• Question 2 - Exploring Alternatives
  • Your design should explore some alternatives that introduce redundancy. These can be motivated by the operations to be executed against the database. We don't expect you to explore many alternatives.

• Assignment 3 has been modified significantly!!!
  • Please note that Assignment 3 has just been changed. Please download the newest version of the assignment and discard the old one. The older version is no longer valid and will not be marked.
    
    We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.

• Integrated Development Environment(IDE) for XQuery and XPath :
  • We strongly recommend that you use either the Stylus Studio tool or another IDE to verify the results for the XML portion of the assignment.
    If you do not have Windows, Xinggang, (your TA) has investigated a few and suggests that you try EditiX which has a 30-day evaluation copy available for free and runs on Linux and Mac/OS. (See his posting on the bulletin board for more discussion on this.) We are looking into installing a copy on CDF and will let you know if and when this is accomplished. NOTE: We have since discovered that it is not possible to share this product on the CDF machines - so sorry :-)
• Drawing ER Diagrams :
  • You must submit an electronic (not hand-drawn) version of your ER Diagram. Any drawing tool that allows you to use boxes, diamonds, triangles, circles, and lines can probably be used to accomplish this task. If you are using Visio, you can use this improvised template for your diagram shapes.