Course Notices | COMP3311 19T1

A2 consultation now (location changed)

Posted by Raymond Wong Friday 10 May 2019, 01:34:34 PM.

It is too crowded and there is exam going there. The tutor has moved to CSE lawn. Please go there instead.

Assignment 2 issues (day correction)

Posted by Raymond Wong Thursday 09 May 2019, 08:30:42 AM.

Correction: the day for 16/5 should be Thursday instead of Friday.

This Friday    10/5   1pm-3pm 
Monday         13/5   1pm-3pm 
Thursday       16/5   1pm-3pm

Assignment 2 mark issues

Posted by Raymond Wong Wednesday 08 May 2019, 02:15:49 PM.

One more consultation slot is available. If you have issues regarding your assignment 2 marks (which you will receive later today), you can come to Level 2 consultation room at K17 on:

This Friday   10/5  1pm-3pm
Monday        13/5  1pm-3pm
Friday        16/5  1pm-3pm

After these, all your assignment marks are finalized.

Assignment 2 results

Posted by Raymond Wong Wednesday 08 May 2019, 01:53:25 PM.

If you have submitted your a2, you will receive your assignment 2 marks by end of tonight, sent to your CSE email address.

If you want to run the tests by yourself (available now):

1) Login to grieg
2) Start PG server
3) Go to the folder containing your submitted files (but not with any other files) and run the following command:
~cs3311/a2/autotest
4) It will output a sequence of Y/N (Y means PASS and N means FAIL the test, totally 15 tests, max 60 secs each).
You can see the details of the 15 tests by: cat ~cs3311/a2/autotest

After you receive your marks, if you find that it is different than the results returned by the above autotest, please contact your tutor. ALL a2 marking is handled by your tutors (I'll forward your emails to them when I check emails, but will be very slow, as I'll only focus on exam marking these 2 weeks). In particular, your tutor is available at the Level 2 consultation room, K17, on:

This Friday   10/5  1pm-3pm
Monday        13/5  1pm-3pm

Please go to see them if you have issues with your marks.

Exam seating allocation

Posted by Raymond Wong Wednesday 01 May 2019, 10:24:36 PM, last modified Wednesday 08 May 2019, 01:11:43 PM.

The seating allocation is available.

https://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~<wbr>cs3311/19T1/seating/final/<wbr>register.cgi/allocations

For the afternoon seating, you will go to the corralling room first and you will then be told the lab when you get there.

Special consultation hours

Posted by Raymond Wong Monday 29 April 2019, 02:14:32 PM.

You can come to see me (Room 213, K17) on this Thursday (May 2) 10:00-11:00 or 14:30-15:30 if you have questions (that are too much to be resolved at the Forums) before the exam.

Tutorials this week

Posted by Raymond Wong Monday 22 April 2019, 05:22:56 PM.

As mentioned in the last lecture, there will be tutorials this week (to revise some exercises and answer any questions you may have from any past exercises / COMP3311 topics).

Due to Anzac Day, the Thursday tutorials will be shifted to next Tuesday (Apr 30). Please refer to the time and location on these shifted tutorials (on week 11) at:

https://webcms3.cse.unsw.edu.au/COMP3311/19T1/timetable

Grieg has been back to normal

Posted by Raymond Wong Thursday 18 April 2019, 06:28:44 PM.

Grieg has been back to normal since this morning. The system support (ss) has kindly removed a large amount of orphaned postgres processes (which were the cause of the issues). So please remember to shutdown the pg server before you logout.

SS has also made some changes to the settings (we now use socket instead of IP addr binding). It should not make any difference to you, as all the commands and scripts have been updated accordingly. These changes will reduce the chance of resources running out in Grieg, and they will monitor the situation of Grieg closely over the next few days.

Therefore, please do thoroughly test your assignment solution on grieg before submission.

Preference of the exam session

Posted by Raymond Wong Thursday 18 April 2019, 06:18:22 PM.

As mentioned in the lecture today, you can state your preference on which exam session (morning or afternoon) you prefer. Otherwise it will be randomly assigned.

The system is able to detect exam clashes and shall automatically schedule your session correctly (even you don't specify your preference). If you want to be sure, you can still specify using this form.

To access form:

https://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs3311/19T1/seating/final/register.cgi/

Assignment 2 extension

Posted by Raymond Wong Wednesday 17 April 2019, 10:29:05 PM.

New due date is 23:59 April 22.

If you are unable to start PG on grieg (due to overloading) and also stuck on installing your own PG/PHP, please check out another possibility:

https://webcms3.cse.unsw.edu.au/COMP3311/19T1/forums/2721202

Grieg overloaded

Posted by Raymond Wong Wednesday 17 April 2019, 02:10:32 PM.

If you have finished, tested on grieg and submitted your assignment 2, you can ignore this notice.

Grieg is overloaded since yesterday, as everyone is working on and testing the assignment 2 several days before the due date.

To reduce the workload of grieg, you may consider installing your local PG & php. Some tips regarding db.php:

https://webcms3.cse.unsw.edu.au/COMP3311/19T1/forums/2720952

Contingency: If grieg is still overloaded in the next few days and you are unable to start PG on grieg to test your assignment, you will have to submit your assignment after testing it on your local setup. However, we will test your solution on the settings same as grieg (to be consistent with the settings assumed by those students who have submitted their assignments), in particular:

PHP 5.3.3
PostgreSQL 9.4

If your settings are newer than the above, you do not have to change your settings as far as you are using the SQL standard features or common PHP functionalities (or else, check their documentations accordingly).

Assignment 2 Spec

Posted by Raymond Wong Saturday 30 March 2019, 02:49:40 AM.

It is available now. It is due on Friday 19th April 23:59.

Before Submitting Assignment 1 ...

Posted by John Shepherd Tuesday 26 March 2019, 04:53:50 PM.

... ensure that your solution ( a1.sql ) will load into PostgreSQL without error if used as follows on grieg :

% dropdb a1-check
% createdb a1-check
% sql a1-check -f asx-schema.sql
% psql a1-check -f asx-insert.sql
% psql a1-check -f a1.sql
... will produce notices, but should have NO ERRORS ...
% psql a1-check
... run a few queries using your views ...

There are penalties if we have to fix your a1.sql file (e.g. change the order of view definitions).

Quiz 2 extension

Posted by Raymond Wong Friday 22 March 2019, 12:23:07 PM.

Due to the site-wise unavailability of CSE websites and webcms, the due date of Quiz 2 will be extended to tomorrow Saturday 23:59

Quiz 2

Posted by Raymond Wong Monday 18 March 2019, 03:57:11 PM.

Please be reminded that Quiz 2 has been released, and it's due this coming Friday 23:59.

Cleaning up your PG sessions

Posted by John Shepherd Monday 18 March 2019, 11:56:23 AM, last modified Monday 18 March 2019, 12:39:32 PM.

On Sunday night, people were not able to run the priv srvr command.

This was because so many people had run priv srvr sessions and left their PG servers running and not bothered to logout properly from Grieg, that Grieg ran out of resources. It required system support to reboot Grieg to fix the problem.

Every time you have a session with PostgreSQL on Grieg ...

ssh to grieg , run priv srvr, source /srvr/you/env
pgs start to start your PostgreSQL server
play with PostgreSQL
pgs stop to stop your PostgreSQL server
exit from grieg

If everyone does this, then we won't keep having the Denial of Service issues that we had on Sunday.

Alternatively, install PostgreSQL on your laptop and do your work there.

Decimal output in Assignment 1

Posted by Raymond Wong Thursday 14 March 2019, 05:20:24 PM.

For clarity, you may output as many decimal digits as you like, the marking script will only compare up to 2 decimal digits. So do not need to worry about the precision after 2 decimal digits.

Assignment 1 sample output

Posted by Raymond Wong Wednesday 13 March 2019, 09:19:48 PM.

Please find the sample output of some queries for Assignment 1 here . This should help with the output format.

Don't forget to test your solution with your own tests too.

Quiz marks

Posted by Raymond Wong Tuesday 12 March 2019, 11:52:32 AM.

As mentioned at the beginning of the lecture today, we will take the top 3 of your quizzes and scale them to 10% of the course. So if you have missed the first quiz, please move on, focus on the other quizzes and submit them early.

Assignment 1 Spec

Posted by Raymond Wong Saturday 09 March 2019, 12:26:46 AM.

It is available now. It is due on Friday 29th March 23:59.

Quiz 1

Posted by Raymond Wong Monday 04 March 2019, 11:42:27 PM.

Please be reminded that Quiz 1 has been released, and it's due this coming Friday.

PostgreSQL versions

Posted by John Shepherd Sunday 03 March 2019, 11:48:09 AM.

There's a discrepancy between the versions of PostgreSQL on grieg and on the rest of the CSE servers. The version on grieg is 9.4, while the version elsewhere is 9.6. If you do all of your PostgreSQL work on grieg , with the pginit -supplied env file, it should work ok. If you try to run PostgreSQL on some other CSE machine, it probably won't work.

If you install PostgreSQL on your own machine, you'll probably get a later version. This doesn't matter. The parts of SQL that we're working with in this course haven't changed from versions 9 to 11. You won't be able to copy databases in binary form, however, but dump-restore should work ok to copy databases from CSE to home. We give you databases either in SQL or pg_dump format, so you don't need to do the dump step unless you create a database on grieg , make changes to it, and then want exactly the same changed database on your own machine.

COMP3311 Notices

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