Design and implementation of a departmental database for the University of Houston Department of Computer Science

The Computer Science Department has envisioned an Oracle database that involves all aspects of departmental activity. The database includes all people involved with the department: students, faculty, staff, lecturers, hourly employees, teaching assistants, and research assistants. The database is concerned with providing information regarding courses offered, course grade distributions, course evaluation results, departmental computer accounts, property inventory, graduate applicants, and e-mail addresses.;This thesis describes the department's database needs as determined by the department chair, the director of undergraduate studies, the director of graduate studies, the manager of LAN administration, and external requirements. The vision for the department's database and the limitations on the present implementation are also described. We analyze issues such as the design and selection of referential integrity tables and selection of primary keys for critical tables. We also discuss importing and validating information using Perl and PL/SQL procedures.