Building a database management system

[arunbg]

This semester, we have to build a database management system (DBMS) as a mini-project.

We do have the database theory course covering database management concepts, sql and pl/sql. The project is to be done using Oracle and possibly Visual Basic for the front end and maybe a programming language for other tasks.

Even with lab sessions, there is little hands-on database designing done, and this makes it hard for me to get an overall idea. I was thinking of using Python as the programming language (having had good experiences with it), connecting it to Oracle using cx_Oracle module.

Again I do not know if this is the easiest or the mainstream way of doing things, googling is of little use as there are so many technologies. It is overwhelming!

Also if I need to design a database driven website, what are the other technologies that I would need? How much web server programming is required? Unfortunately, I have no experience there.

I'm missing the big picture here, so any clarifications, links, suggestions or books to refer to are appreciated.
Oh, and I am always willing to learn :)

 

[QuantumQuest]

As of now, there are even (a lot) more options compared to 2008 for the programming languages which one can use for an Oracle DBMS - or any other DBMS for that matter, as also for frameworks, libraries and tools - in the broad sense of the term, which he / she can utilize in order to make his / her life a lot easier and do the job at hand in a more efficient and secure way. Python was - and still is, a very good choice due to its flexibility but Java would also be a great choice - particularly nowadays, among others.

For a database driven website which is the absolute rule nowadays, besides Oracle which is extremely reliable, there is a whole lot of choices for DBMS (e.g. MySQL (acquired by Oracle), MariaDB (open source), PostgreSQL (open source), Microsoft SQL Server among others), many server side scripting languages (PHP, Java, Python, .NET languages like Visual Basic and C# among others - Visual Studio). The question of how much web server programming is needed has no definite answer at any time and in any case: it depends on the size of the project at hand. Good thing is that for both server and client side programming there are lots of efficient frameworks and tools that can be utilized, so the size of web applications has been effectively increased by much.

There is also a whole lot of learning resources which can be easily found using google and a whole lot of books and eductional resources as well.