Databases: Tuples

That's it - third year is over. The Databases exam didn't go as badly as the Logic one, and in truth I didn't really feel that it was that bad an exam in its own right. This may well be just because nothing could possibly be as bad as Logic - the people who were sensible enough not to do that course seemed to think a lot worse of the exam than I did.

Pre-packaged Database exam answers.

The main problem with the exam was that I was expecting questions that remotely related to the course we'd actually done - some SQL queries, perhaps, or talking about recovery from crashes. Instead we were given a heap of vague semi-essay questions that could only be answered with similarly imprecise and unclear answers.

One of the questions that was most guilty of this was the last part of the second question, which asked "Consider writing a new language that incorporates elements of databases and programming code. Discuss the issues that would arise in its implementation or development." It might as well have been replaced with "Waffle [4 marks]". Even though there is so much to discuss when thinking about something of that enormity, it was indeed only worth four marks, which made it difficult to decide what to put in. I left that one until last, though, and wrote a mini-essay on the subject because I had half an hour left over. That'll show her.

So afterwards, the computer scientists retreated to the pubs in the town to indulge in some wine related carnage. It really doesn't feel like third year is over. Last time I thought about it, it had hardly started.