SuiteDBDoc: Free Software for Teaching Databases

En el reciente congreso sobre Fomento e Innovación con Nuevas Tecnologías en la Docencia de la Ingeniería FINDTI 2009 hemos presentado un paper que resume varios años de trabajo en la enseñanza del diseño de bases de datos. Se trata del desarrollo de un conjunto de aplicaciones, publicadas con licencia de software libre, que facilitan el aprendizaje del diseño e implementación de bases de datos relaciones según el modelo entidad-relación (E/R).

dbdoc

La referencia completa es:

Garrido, P., Martínez, F.J., Naranjo, F., Plaza, I., Tramullas, J. SuiteDBDoc: Free Software for Teaching Databases. En FINTDI 2009 Fomento e Innovación con Nuevas Tecnologías en la Docencia de la Ingeniería. IEEE, Sociedad de Educación, 2009, 173-178.

Abstract—SuiteDBDoc is a software suite specially designed to improve teaching of the Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS), that has been developed in the University of Zaragoza (Spain). The suite includes three ad-hoc software tools (ACAR, Anacon, and DEREditor) which provide coverage to the syllabus and the evaluation activities of two subjects: (i) Database I, and (ii) Database II. The software tools presented allow students to learn important database concepts without geographical barriers (distance learning), and these tools are non dependent of any commercial RDBMS software or any Operating System since they are opensource and multi-platform. Moreover, they accomplish the manipulation standard programming languages (Relational Algebra (RA), Tuple Relational Calculus (TRC), and Standard Query Language (SQL)). Results demonstrate that students are pleased to use the suite, and the academical results obtained the last years have improved significantly, where the number of students that passed both database subjects has increased by 30%.