CSE 544:  Principles of Database Management Systems

Instructor

Alon Levy, alon@cs.washington.edu
Sieg 310, 543-8099, office hours W 2:30-3:30

Teaching Assistants

Zack Ives, zives@cs.washington.edu
Sieg 224, 616-3997, office hours M 12:00-1:00 and by arrangement

Rachel Pottinger, rap@cs.washington.edu
Sieg 224, 616-3997, office hours Th 2:30-3:20 and by arrangement

Time and Place

Every Wednesday and Friday, 12:00-1:20, MEB 243
Monday, April 5, 12:00-1:20, room TBA
Monday, April 19, 12:00-1:20, room TBA

Prerequisites

No prior database knowledge is required.  Familiarity with Java, TCP sockets, and basic dynamic programming and search algorithms is desirable.

Course Objectives

The goal of this course is to provide an understanding of how to design a database management system.  We will focus on physical representation of data, query execution, and query optimization in both database and data integration contexts. 

Text

Database System Implementation, by Jeffrey D. Ullman, Jennifer Widom, and Hector Garcia-Molina, to be published by Prentice-Hall in June; preliminary copies will be available for the class from the Communications Copy Center, in the basement of the Communications Building, northwest of the HUB.

Assignments and Project:

There will be two programming assignments:

1. The initial homework assignment will be to practice with SQL querying and data manipulation, and will require the use of Visual Interdev and/or Microsoft Access on Windows NT (other platforms will be permitted, but our level of support for this will be minimal).
2. The second assignment, designed to illustrate some of the principles of query execution, will be to implement a relational hash join operator in Java (other languages may be allowed; consult the instructor and TAs).

The project, which will be assigned to groups of approximately 3 students, will be to design a query optimizer that sends queries to the Tukwila data integration system.   This project will give you experience with a real system, and, for those interested, it could potentially form the beginnings of a future research project.

Grading

• Homeworks 1 and 2 total: 15%
• Midterm: 15%
• Project: 25%
• Final exam: 35%
• Participation and intangibles: 10%

E-Mail and WWW

You should subscribe to the class mailing list by sending the message contents subscribe cse544 to majordomo@cs.washington.edu.   You should also consult the course web page periodically for updates, assignments, the mailing list archive, and general information.

Additional Resources

On reserve in Engineering Library:

• R. Ramakrishnan.  Database Management Systems.  McGraw-Hill, 1998.
• M. T. Ozsu and P. Valduriez.  Principles of Distributed Databases, 2nd ed.   Prentice-Hall, 1999.

Other textbooks:

• A. Silberschatz, H. F. Korth, S. Sudarshan.  Database System Concepts, 3rd ed.  McGraw-Hill, 1997.
• J. D. Ullman, J. Widom.  A First Course in Database Systems.   Prentice-Hall, 1997.

On the Web:

• DBLP database and logic programming index (ACM mirror):  http://www.acm.org/sigmod/dblp/db/
• University of Washington database group:  http://data.cs.washington.edu/
• University of California database group:  http://hera.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/CS/DBMS/
• Stanford University database group:  http://www-db.stanford.edu/
• University of Wisconsin database group:  http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~raghu/dbaffiliates.html
• University of Maryland database group:  http://www.cs.umd.edu/areas/Databases/
• IBM Almaden Research Center:  http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/data.html