Data Management

Overview

Databases are essential to applications in a wide variety of domains, including finance, health care, commerce, and telecomunications. In fact, most applications that people use on a day-to-day bases are backed by databases. This course provides a balanced introduction to relational database management systems from two perspectives: that of the database user, and that of the database implementor. On the user side, the course will cover: modeling enterprise data with ER diagrams, the relational model, SQL, logical design with normalization, transaction processing, recovery, and concurrency. On the implementation side, the course will cover physical design, data storage, buffer management, indexing, and query execution. Time permitting, the course will briefly discuss some advanced topics such as processing unstructured or semi-unstructured data, graph databases, and NoSQL systems.

The course work will consist of implementing components of a relational database management system, exercises using an industrial DBMS, as well as data modeling and design problems. The implementation projects will involve a significant amount of programming in C++. You do not need to know C++ to take this course, but you should have a background in programming either C or Java. If you don't have programming experience, you may want to consider another course.

Details

Textbooks

We rely on one textbook:

Database Management Systems (DBMS), 3rd edition, by Raghu Ramakrishnan, Johannes Gehrke. (Called the Cow Book)

Additionally, a reference on C++ may be useful, such as one of the following:

The C++ Programming Language, 4th edition, by Bjarne Stroustrup.
Programming -- Principles and Practice Using C++, by Bjarne Stroustrup.

Moodle

Please send class-related questions to the Discussions Forum on Moodle (unless, of course, they concern private rather than technical or organizational issues).

Grading Policy

15% for homework and 25% for projects; 20% for the mid-term; 40% for the final exam.

Academic Integrity

I encourage you to collaborate on homework assignments. But you must write up and turn in your own answers. Also, you must clearly indicate who you collaborated with. If I detect any incidents of cheating, I will report them immediately to the department, and the assignment will be given a grade of 0.