That Blue Square Thing

Syllabus content:

Unit 7 content – PDF doc to download

Note: this syllabus content is a slightly amended version of the one published freely on the web by AQA. I have made very minor adjustments to remove some content less suitable for students to use and it is presented here simply to allow the children I teach to download a usable copy of the syllabus content. It is copyright AQA and reproduced here simply to make access easier for students. No attempt to claim copyright is being made, although I could have copied the text into my own interpretation...

AQA Computer Science GCSE

Databases and SQL

Databases are really important in the modern world.

We use data everywhere. And that has to be organised, usually in a database.

Most of the marks here will be for writing database queries, but there are some really important definitions that you need to make sure that you know as well. Don't ignore these sorts of things.

Key points:

Definitions – the key set of terms you need to know

Key database ideas – fields and records

Introducing databases

Database basics – slides from class

Intro questions – the terms to define

Data types

Birds database exam questions

Some examples of databases might be handy.

Some real-world examples of databases

Some examples of primary keys

Problems with simple databases

Basic single table databases have some problems associated with them. The problems are particularly bad once the database gets very large.

Two database problems

These problems can be solved by moving to more complex, multi-table databases.

More complex databases

Multi-table (relational) databases

And this brings us to relational databases.

These solve most of the problems from single table databases and are a much more efficient way to store data. They form the basis of any complex database.

Relational databases – slides from class

Questions in an exam style

More on databases

There's a quite nice introduction to databases on BBC Bitesize that might be useful. It's for the CCEA syllabus becuase this topic didn't used to be in the AQA one and so they didn't write a Bitesize guide for it.