CMSC 424{0101 Fall 2001 PHW02 (100 pts) Due Tue, 18 Sep 2001

c



Sudarshan S. Chawathe 2001

Name:

Submission le name:

(Fill in the above information on a hardcopy of this document and submit it at the beginning

of class on the due date. See below for details.)

This assignment asks you to build a small (toy) database application for storing infor-

mation about shipments being made by a package delivery company (e.g., UPS). The goal

is to gain experience using an application programming interface (API) to Oracle and Post-

greSQL. Transforming the following specication into an application and learning all the

required details (e.g., linking libraries, Makeles) are important parts of this assignment.

As described in detail in the packaging instructions below, your submission should pro-

duce two executable les. The rst, called

shipperO

should implement this application using

Oracle to store data. The second, called

shipperP

, should be identical in behavior to ship-

perO; however, it should use PostgreSQL to store data. You may use either the C/C++

interface described in Chapter 3 of the Oracle8 textbook, or a Javainterface (JDBC or

SQLJ). You may also use any other interface of your choice (e.g., Perl DBI); however, you'll

have to install any additional software you need yourself. Reminder: Please start working

on this assignment early; use the newsgroup for questions and clarications.

Since wehaven't studied schema design methods yet, we will, for now, store all the

necessary information in a single table called

Shipments

. This table should have one column

for each of the following attributes: sender's name, sender's address, sender's phone number,

sender's accountnumber, recepient's name, recepient's address, recepient's phone number,

recepient's accountnumber, pickup date and time, promised delivery date and time, action

code, and weight (in pounds). The action code is a short string that may contain values such

as \forward to station MD103" and \undeliverable; return to sender." The semantics for

the other columns should be evident from their names. Pick suitable types for each column.

Note that the pickup date and time is a single attribute, as is the promised delivery date

and time. The types you choose should be neither too restrictive nor too p ermissive. For

example, do not assume that phone numbers are in U.S. standard form; they maybeany

alphanumeric string (e.g., 1-800-GET-RICH, 1.91.22.555.HELP). On the other hand, do not

store dates and times as strings.

You must implementyour application program as a Unix command-line program that

reads from standard input and writes to standard output. This application must implement

the user functions described below. When the work (both internal processing and output to

user) for each function is done, your application should write (to standard output) ve dashes

(

-----

) followed by a single newline character. We will refer to this string of ve dashes

followed by a newlne as the

function termination string

. The following description also refers

to a

separator string

, which consists of the three character sequence space-colon-space.

These functions will be invoked from standard input by listing the function name followed

by its arguments, one per line. For example, the

connect

function described below takes two

1