Tutorial II - SQL and Databases

Chun Liang, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Miami University
Location: Shriver Center
Monday 10:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

Modern biological and biomedical research is producing enormous amounts of raw and derivative data. Databases housing these data prove to be an indispensable and critical component for unexpected discoveries and conceptual advances in our understanding of biology. Currently, bioinformatics databases are shifting their focuses from primary data capture to data aggregation and integration. What is next for bioinformatics databases?

This tutorial will help you understand the basic concepts and techniques in databases, structured query language (SQL) and their applications in bioinformatics. While we will cover different types of database such as flat file and object-oriented databases, our primary focus is on relational databases, the most popular ones in bioinformatics as well as in industry. This tutorial will cover basic ideas in database design using Entity-Relationship Model, and provide hand-on activities in data definition language (DDL) and data manipulation language (DML) using the open-source software MySQL. In this tutorial, we will also cover many different biological databases (e.g., GenBank, PDB, EMBL and so on) and the practical strategies to utilize them. Driven by many bioinformatics examples, the tutorial is suitable to both biologists as well as entry-level informaticians.

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