Software Engineering and Databases

Flashcards covering vocabulary terms from lecture notes on software engineering and databases.

Problem Statement

A clear definition of a program's purpose that begins the process of planning a computer program.

Abstraction (in programming)

Abstraction protects programmers from the details of instruction sets and binary data representation.

Keyword (in programming)

A word with a predefined meaning in a programming language.

Syntax

The set of rules that specify the sequence of keywords, parameters, and punctuation in a program instruction.

Operand

In an assembly language instruction, the data, or the address of the data, for an operation.

Op Code

An assembly language command word for an operation, such as add, compare, or jump.

Assembler

A utility program that translates a program written in an assembly language into machine language.

Interpreter

A program that converts and executes one statement at a time while the program is running, serving as a common alternative to a compiler.

SDK (Software Development Kit)

A collection of language-specific programming tools that allows a programmer to develop applications for a specific computer platform.

Pseudocode

A notational system for algorithms that is less formal than a programming language but more formal than structured English.

Constant

A value that remains the same throughout the program.

Method

A block of code that defines an action in an object-oriented program.

Polymorphism

The ability to redefine a method in a subclass.

Formal Methods

Rigorous logical and mathematical models applied to software design, composition, testing, and verification to increase software security and safety.

Encapsulation

The process of hiding the internal details of objects and their methods.

Predicate

In Prolog, the element that describes the relationship between arguments.

Goal (in Prolog)

A question asked to query a Prolog program's database.

Rules (in Prolog)

A means to manipulate facts within the Prolog language.

Database

A collection of information typically stored as computer files.

Data Mining

Computer algorithms that analyze information to discover previously unknown and useful information.

Field (database)

The smallest unit of meaningful information in a database.

Record Type

The template for a record in a database.

Record Occurrence

A record that contains data.

Cardinality (database)

The number of associations that can exist between two record types.

Relational Database

A database that stores data in a collection of tables, each of which is a sequence of records, similar to a flat file.

Normalization

A database design process to minimize storage space and increase processing efficiency.

SQL Keywords

Special command words in the SQL query language.

Parameters (SQL)

Detailed specifications for a command in SQL.

Sharding

Process of dividing a database into distributed subsets.

Schema (database)

The blueprint to which a relational database is organized

Dynamic scaling

Ensuring acceptable database throughput by scaling out as necessary to handle peak loads