SAMPLE QUESTIONS FOR THE ROOTS LECTURE

What is the key benefit provided by the relational model over previous data
models?

What are three types of physical data dependence described by Codd in his
paper. 

Explain Codd's notion of "point of ambiguity" in a join.  Give an example of
a situation where he may want to compute something other than a natural join.

Name the two main modules of the system R implementation.

We repeatedly (will) find sort and hash as two choices in many circumstances.
Which of these two options did System R implementors choose consistently?

Assume a page size of 8K Bytes, a record size of 100 bytes.
Consider a sequence of 256 transactions, each of which updates a single
record at random.  Let the log associated with each transaction be 128 bytes.
How much I/O is required with Write-Ahead Logging as the recovery method?
How much I/O with shadow paging?  
Ignore index access costs in both cases.  State any additional assumptions
made.