WinRDBI: a Windows-based relational database educational tool

RDBI is an educational tool that provides students with the capability to test their understanding of the formal relational query languages (relational algebra, domain relational calculus and tuple relational calculus) and the industry standard query language SQL. Although RDBI is an integral part of the database management courses at a number of universities, it is unavailable to those universities that do not have a license for the software product in which RDBI is implemented. WinRDBI, a version of RDBI for Windows, removes this limitation by increasing the availability of the educational tool to a standard Windows platform. Another advantage of WinRDBI is its graphical user interface, providing the student with a more intuitive interface than the command line interface of RDBI. This paper describes the architecture and user interface of WinRDBI. The features of WinRDBI are also illustrated using nontrivial examples from a popular database text. Although formal relational query languages do not provide inherent support for aggregation, these examples illustrate how to write queries in the formal languages to support (a limited form of) counting and minimum/maximum queries.