Fun for Thursday, February 23, 2006

<h3>Bureaucracy</h3>

Reminder that tonight in 1-150 at 7:30 pm we have Shimon Rura's startup
"meetup".

<h3>Design Question of the Day</h3>

<a
href="http://lids.hul.harvard.edu:8080/lids/lids?id=3910449&buttons=y&caption=Historical+Collections,+Baker+Library,+Harvard+Business+School">Harvard
library photo</a>

<h3>Client Meeting Notes</h3>

<a href="http://l3v.mit.edu/doc/notes1">http://l3v.mit.edu/doc/notes1</a>

<h3>Back to the airlines</h3>

Corporate managers today see I.T.  as worthless, but the clever
programmers at American Airlines in the 1960s who made SABRE made
$billions for the company.  They did it all in less than 1 MB.
Microsoft needs 10 MB these days for a printer driver.

<p>

Let's look at 

<a
href="http://ug.mit.edu/doc/flight-reservations.txt">http://ug.mit.edu/doc/flight-reservations.txt</a>
first.  Questions:

<ul>
<li>does tickets have a primary key?

<li>will these guys be able to show a list of passengers sorted by last
name?

<li>how many rows in the tickets table are scanned for the query in
Exercise 4?

</ul>

Let's look at some formatting...

<pre>
select first, last from tickets, flights, people where flight_number =
237 and tickets.flight_id = flights.flight_id and people.person_id =
tickets.person_id;

versus

select first, last 
from tickets, flights, people 
where flight_number = 237 
and tickets.flight_id = flights.flight_id
and people.person_id = tickets.person_id;
</pre>

Here's another take on it...

<pre>
create table Flight_Schedule (
       Flight_ID int primary key,
       Flight# int not null,
       Origin varchar(3) not null,
       Destination varchar(3) not null,
       Depart_Time datetime not null,
       Arrive_Time datetime not null,
       Date datetime not null
)

create table Airplane_Statistics (
       Flight_ID int not null,
       Seat# int not null,
       Passenger_ID int
)

create table Passenger_Information (
       Passenger_ID int primary key,
       First_Names varchar(50) not null,
       Last_Names varchar(60) not null,
       CreditCard# varchar(16) not null,
       Address varchar(100) not null
)
</pre>

Questions:

<ul>

<li>Would a maintenance programmer in 2015 think to look in
"airplane_statistics" for reservations?

<li>What about all of these tables without keys?

<li>What if we had a primary key of (flight_id,passenger_id)?  Does that
create an index?  If not, how long do inserts take?  If so, what kinds
of queries are fast?

</ul>

<p>

Let's look at the Oracle binary-tree <a href="/teaching/6171/oracle-b-tree.gif">figure</a>.

<h3>User Registration</h3>

Let's hear from the teams...

<ul>
<li>Mo and Zak/Solidworks

<li>Brian, John, and Kevin (HKN Underground Guide)

<li>David and Pamela (iCompact)

<li>Marios and Fivos (East Asian)

<li>Ravi and Abdul (atMyPad)

<li>Lev and Brian (ECAC)

</ul>

Philip shows the user admin pages from philip.greenspun.com?