Teaching database skills

I have created a 680mb MS Access database using the data from http://www.freedb.org/. It allowed me to produce two tables.

The smaller table is Artist with 752822 records. Now that table in itself is useful. Firstly my students tend to be interested in music so I can use questions like - “Use the database to create a list of all of the albums where 'Brenda Fassie' is the artist”. If you do not know how to produce a query, this could be a problem.

I also created a table called songs and imported the data. This table has 9318848 records.

Each record in the artist table has a key field called 'index' and this is linked to a field in songs called 'index'.

I am teaching a year 10 ICT class next semester where one of the major focuses is databases, getting them to understand simple relational types. I think that I will present the course with the aid of Moodle so that I can use quizzes and forums in combination with the database. I will instruct the students to download the database to the C: drive on their computer so that we do not have complications re sharing of the database and it will increase speed of querying etc.

Facts and acknowledgments

• freedb data file was from http://www.freedb.org/ This file is 309mb in size and is licensed with the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE.

• utility to convert this data to a importable text file was thanks to cforce

• The conversion process used 100% cpu for about 9 hours