Databases are at the heart of modern commercial application development. Their use extends beyond this to many applications and environments where large amounts of data must be stored for efficient update and retrieval. The purpose of this course is to provide an introduction to the design and use of database systems, as well as an appreciation of the key issues in building such systems.
The class meets twice a week. Each lecture comes with one or two reading assignments. It is very important that you read the papers before class and come prepared to discuss them. Each class will be a mix of lecture and discussion. Class participation is a significant part of your final grade.
There will be two homework assignments. The main goal of these assignments is to ensure that everyone in the class knows how to use a database and how to write applications that use a database. For many of you, these assignments should be quite easy, although you should still learn a thing or two.
A big part of the class will be a programming project, which will be designed as a mini research project. You can find the instructions for the project on the class website (http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/07au/544/project/). At the end of the project, you are expected to hand-in a conference-style paper and make a presentation in class.
Read the papers before coming to lecture and start your project early. We expect you to spend most of your time in this class reading the papers and working on your project.
We assume that you have taken an undergraduate database class and that you vaguely remember it. If you did not take a database class before, for each topic that we cover, you should read the related undergraduate material in the textbook. You can also expect that the workload in the class will be very high for you.
We will post copies of the slides used in the lecture on the class web site (after the lecture).
The following book is required for the class. Some lectures will review material from this textbook and will include readings from this book. Please make sure to get the third edition of this book.
The following are additional books that you may find useful:
The evaluation includes 2 assignments, a project, paper reviews, and class participation.
Late policy: For all hand-ins (except the project presentation), you are allowed a total of 3 late-days that you can use in 24-hour chunks at anytime. Please note that once you use-up your late days, no additional extensions will be granted for any reason at all. You should thus save your late-days only for true emergencies. The project presentation must be done on the scheduled day. Additionally, we will not accept paper reviews submitted after lecture.
Collaboration policy: You are encouraged to discuss the content of this class. For assignments, you are allowed to discuss them and point each other to relevant documentation (a book chapter, a website, etc.). However, each student must produce their own solution, and you may NOT look at the solutions produced by other students. Feel free to look-up any information on the web that you may find useful in completing the assignments. In contrast, projects will be done in groups of two students and groups can talk to each other about their projects as much as they want. Of course, if two teams pick the same project, we expect each team to produce original work different from that of other teams.
Please see the class schedule posted on the class website (http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/07au/544/schedule.html).
I hope you will attend every lecture. If you miss a lecture, talk to a friend who was present, and be sure to check the class website for messages.
The course website and mailing list will be used extensively to provide you with course information, such as the class schedule, lecture notes, homework assignments, class messages, and other things.
Information about labs, computing resources, and various other useful pointers are posted on the: class website (http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/07au/544/resources/).