Research On The Relational Algebra Teaching System

Database theory and technology has always been an important research area of computer science and relational database management system has been developed rapidly and become the mainstream of database field. Relational algebra are the mathematical theory basis of relational database query language included SQL, which is the official standard relational query language. It is important to master relational algebra theory for in-depth study of the database system principle. So how to improve the quality of teaching relational algebra in database curriculum is an important and meaningful topic.This paper focuses on relational algebra education, and defines the formal syntax of the relational algebra completely by using BNF grammar, construct a lexical analyzer and a syntax parser for relational algebra, gives the algorithms of all of relational algebra operators, and designs and implements a relational algebra teaching system which is called RAInterpreter.RAInterpreter supports all of relational algebra operations completely, could identify and resolve the relational algebra expression, load and save relational data files from a disk. It also provides a command line interface to facilitate students to enter the relational algebra expression for querying data so that it can help students learn the theory of relational algebra and query optimization.