How to design a physics problem Database?

I have both problems and solutions to over twenty years of physics PhD qualifying exams that I would like to make more accessible, searchable, and useful.

The problems on the Quals are organized into several different categories. The first category is Undergraduate or Graduate problems. (The first day of the exam is Undergraduate, the second day is Graduate). Within those categories there are several subjects that are tested: Mechanics, Electricity & Magnetism, Statistical Mechanics, Quantum Mechanics, Mathematical Methods, and Miscellaneous. Other identifying features: Year, Season, and Problem number.

I'm specifically interested in designing a web-based database system that can store the problem and solution and all the identifying pieces of information in some way so that the following types of actions could be done.

• Search and return all Electricity & Magnetism problems.
• Search and return a开发者_JAVA技巧ll graduate Statistical Mechanics problems.
• Create a random qualifying exam — meaning a new 20 question test randomly picking 2 Undergrad mechanics problems, 2 Undergrade E&M problems, etc. from past qualifying exams (over some restricted date range).
• Have the option to hide or display the solutions on results.

Any suggestions or comments on how best to do this project would be greatly appreciated!

I've written up some more details here if you're interested.

For your situation, it seems that it is more important part to implement the interface than the data storage. To store the data, you can use a database table or tags. Each record in the database (or tag) should have the following properties:

1. Year
2. Season
3. Undergradure or Graduate
4. Subject: CM, EM, QM, SM, Mathematical Methods, and Miscellaneous
5. Problem number (is it neccesary?)
6. Question
7. Answer

• Search and return all Electricity & Magnetism problems.

Directly query the database and you will get an array, then display some or all questions.

• Create a random qualifying exam — meaning a new 20 question test randomly picking 2 Undergrad mechanics problems, 2 Undergrade E&M problems, etc. from past qualifying exams (over some restricted date range).

To generate a random exam, you should first outline the number of questions for each category and the years it drawn from. For example, if you want 2 UG EM question. Query the database for all UG EM questions and then perform a random shuffling on the question array. Finally, select the first two of them and display this question to student. Continue with the other categories and you will get a complete random exam paper.

• Have the option to hide or display the solutions on results.

It is your job to determine whether you want the students to see answer. It should be controlled by only one variable.

Are "Electricity & Magnetism" and "Statistical Mechanics" mutually exclusive categoriztions, along the same dimension? Are there multiple dimensions in categories you want to search for?

If the answer is yes to both, then I would suggest you look into multidimensional data modeling. As a physicist, you've got a leg up on most people when it comes to evaluating the number of dimensions to the problem. Analyzing reality in a multidimensional way is one of the things physicists do.

Sometimes obtaining and learning an MDDB tool is overkill. Once you've looked into multidimensional modeling, you may decide you like the modeling concept, but you still want to implement using relational databases that use the SQL interface.

In that case, the next thing to look into is star schema design. Star schema is quite different from normalization as a design principle, and it doesn't offer the same advantages and limitations. But it's worth knowing in the case where the problem is really a multidimensional one.