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Scs 433/Ccs 426: Advance Database System Question Paper
Scs 433/Ccs 426: Advance Database System
Course:Bachelor Of Science In Computer Science
Institution: Maseno University question papers
Exam Year:2014
MASENO UNIVERSITY
UNIVERSITY EXAMINATIONS 2013/2014
FOURTH YEAR FIRST SEMESTER EXAMINATIONS FOR THE
DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF SCIENCE IN COMPUTER SCIENCE
(CITY CAMPUS)
SCS 433/CCS 426: ADVANCE DATABASE SYSTEM
Date: 2nd April, 2014 Time: 5.30 — 7.30 p.m.
INSTRUCTIONS:
. SECTION A: Question ONE IS COMPULSORY (30 marks).
. SECTION B: Q 2-Q 5 Attempt ANY Two questions (20 marks each),
MASENO UNIVERSITY ISO 9001 :2008 CERTIFIED
Question One
A. Discuss the relative advantages of centralized and distributed databases.(4 marks)
B. Outline two advantages and two disadvantages of each of the following strategies for storing a relational database: (4 marks)
(i)Store each relation in one file.
(ii)Store multiple relations (perhaps even the entire database) in one file.
C. For each of the following application areas, explain why a relational database system would be inadequate. List all specific system components that would need to be modified.
(i)Computer-aided design
(ii)Multimedia databases
D. Outline any three application areas of Multimedia databases (6 marks)
E. With Management Information System being implemented in recent years, it’s now being used in the University wide activities, Maseno University seeks to introduce data fragmentation; in your own view, how would fragmentation benefit the University? (8 marks)
Question Two
A. A car-rental company maintains a vehicle database for all vehicles in its current fleet, for all vehicles, it includes the vehicle identification number, license number, manufacturer, model, date of purchase, and color. Special data are included for certain types of vehicles:
Trucks: cargo capacity
Sports cars: horsepower, renter age requirement
Vans: number of passengers
Off-road vehicles: ground clearance, drive train (four- or two-wheel drive)
Construct an object-oriented database schema definition for this database. Use inheritance where appropriate. (10 marks)
B. Suppose that you have been hired as a consultant to choose a database system for your client's applications. For each of the following applications, state what type of database system (relational, persistent-programming-language- based OODB, object relational; do not specify a commercial product) you would recommend. Justify your recommend (10 marks)
i)A computer-aided design system for a manufacturer of airplanes
ii)A system to track contributions made to candidates for public office
iii)An information system to support the making of movies
Question Three
Maseno University has several satellite campuses, with each campus having its database server, the university management wishes to have a distributed database to make access easy from the main campus and sharing of data among the campuses; Outline to management how the distributed Databases work, the types of distributed databases, the pros and cons, how data will be stored in this environment and the kind of distributed DBMS architecture to use to implement the task. (20 marks)
Question Four
A. With pipelined parallelism, it is often a good idea to perform several operations in a pipeline on a single processor, even when many processors are available. (9 marks)
(i)Explain why.
(ii)Would the arguments you advanced in part a hold if the machine has a shared-memory architecture? Explain why or why not.
(iii)Would the arguments in part a hold with independent parallelism? (That is, are there cases where, even if the operations are not pipelined and there are many processors available, it is still a good idea to perform several operations on the same processor?)
B. Explain how the following differ: fragmentation transparency replication transparency, and location transparency. (6 marks)
C. When is it useful to have replication or fragmentation of data? Explain your answer. (5 marks)
Question Five
A.For each of the three partitioning techniques, namely round-robin, hash partitioning, and range partitioning, give an example of a query for which that partitioning technique would provide the fastest response. (8 Marks)
B.For easy location of Maseno University campuses, the School of Computing has been tasked to automate the location system, you have been involved to steer the team to develop an appropriate database for the same; Advice your team on the most suitable database for the task, why would you chose it over the others, what would be the most likely challenges to be faced? (12 Marks)
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