This course is intended to give students a solid background in relational DBMS. Furthermore is outlines non-relational solutions. If you are interested in becoming an effective user of a DBMS, or a DBMS professional, this is a good introduction to the topic. The course has three main parts: the first part explains how to use a relational DBMS, the second part looks at how a relational DBMS works internally . A third, shorter part, looks at other data models, especially for large-scale data management, and their implementation in cloud environments.
The first part will discuss the design of databases and how to write queries that extract the data you are looking for. Or in other words: how can you squeeze your "real world" data (the product information of a bookstore, the student and activity information of a students' association) into the relational data model of the database system and how can you retrieve the data later.
The second part of the course is system-oriented and discusses the
internals of a DBMS. Using a DBMS is one issue, using it efficiently
and correctly is a different story. DBMS are designed to work for very
different application areas and present a general purpose software. In
order to be able to tune a DBMS to your specific requirements you must
know how your database application is executed by the DBMS.
This
second part will cover two main areas: Transaction management is
important to keep data consistent when updates occur. Query
execution
is the process that efficiently finds the small set of data the user
wants to see out of a possibly huge database.
Throughout the course we will also talk about non-relational (NoSQL) data models and their implementation: semi-structured data that is better able to handle document-type data and key-value stores that are better able to store and query huge amount of data in a distributed fashion.
Objectives:
In this course you will
Preliminary Topic List (each topic between 2 and 4 lectures):
Prerequisites: The official pre-requisites are COMP-206, COMP-251 and COMP-302. In general, you have to have taken a good set of COMP courses. Which ones exactly is not that relevant but you have to have a good general undstanding of data structures, algorithms, programming languages and basics of program development. Also, how programs are executed and run on modern computer systems. Knowledge of operating systems is of advantage.
Marking Scheme: There are 3 written assignments, three
project deliveries, one map-reduce exercise, one midterm, and
one
final. The scheme will be
In assignments the students have to solve concrete
problems (one assignment is on SQL, and students have to turn in
runnable SQL statements). In some cases, late turn-in
might not be possible (e.g., if I want to post the solution before the
midterm/final). Otherwise, a late turn-in will result in
a penalty of 10% per day (e.g. if an assignment has in total 100
points,
a student achieves 80 points but turns in the assignment a day too
late,
then he/she will receive 80-10=70 points).
One or more assignments might be done in groups of several
students. This still has to be determined depending on TA capacity.
The three programming deliveries build a project in which students have to develope and build a database application for a real-world domain. The students will design a schema, create a database using DB2, maintain, query and update the data, and develop application programs.
The students will work in teams of three on the programming project. All team members are supposed to work together and participate equally in the project development.
In the map-reduce exercise, students will do large-scale (or more ralistically, medium-scale) data analysis using a cluster of computers and a map-reduce implementation.
Both midterm and final will likely partially consist of multiple choise questions.
Course Book: