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Database Management Systems

CMSC 461-02 - Spring 2023

Homework 3

Due: Friday, April 28th by 11:59:00 PM EDT (on Blackboard)

Musical Selection: Ballade No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 23 — Frédéric Chopin

Respond to the following prompts with appropriate answers. Submit a PDF of your responses on Blackboard. Each question has an indicator of how many points it is worth.

  1. (15 points) Briefly describe what multitable clustering is and why one might want to do such a thing in storing database records.
  2. (10 points) Describe what the data dictionary of a database is.
  3. (15 points) With regard to buffering, describe what pinning is and why it is important.
  4. (10 points) Why are secondary indices always dense?
  5. (5 points) What Operating System data structure did I relate a multilevel index of a database system to in lecture?
  6. (25 points) Show the result of inserting the numbers listed below into a B+ tree with n = 4 (that is to say that there are 4 pointers in each node). The sort order of the tree shall be in ascending numerical order and the numbers should be inserted in the order specified here:
    42, 18, 23, 7, 104, 3, 4, 84, 17, 37, 27, 0
  7. (10 points) Name the selection algorithm that is always applicable no matter what selection criteria are used and explain why it is always applicable.
  8. (10 points) Describe the difference between nested-loop join and block nested-loop join. Which will generally have the better performance of the two?

Last modified Thursday, 20-Apr-2023 23:59:03 EDT