Course Instances, Course Aliases and Courses

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This section will attempt to explain the CourseInstances, CourseAliases and Courses tables.

Lets start with some quick definitions.

A course is really just a title. MH 216 is a course. In RD a course is not a class. Courses span many years a class it taught in a single term. A unique course is a 3-tuple of (department_id, course_number, uniform_title). For some reason the NULL uniform_title doesn't get matched as a duplicate. It's probably a php null -> mysql null translation problem

A course instance is something which has a reserves list and is taught by one or more instructors. CourseInstances can be thought of as classes (class is a reserved word in php so we didnt use that name).

Course Aliases tie Course to CourseInstances so every CourseInstance must have at least one CourseAlias

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