Database System Implementation

Lectures were useful maybe 50% of the time. Spent way too much time on c++ and not enough time digging into more internals of databases. I might just be too smooth brained, but I thought the exams were kinda challenging. Wording was strange at times, and I felt they took "practical application of course material, multiple choice, and not much written math" to its limit in difficulty. Some exam questions were on research papers that were provided throughout the semester. I found the topics interesting, but the reading load on them wasn't very balanced. TAs were slow to respond. Office hours were exactly once, 1 hr/week, which was bad, but always with the professor.

The professor himself was one of the best parts of the class. Even though the lecture content was often not what I wanted to be watching, he's extremely happy to be talking about this material. During office hours, he was genuinely interested in hearing from students, helping where he could, and giving high-level overviews of the research papers.

• This course felt like a beta course. It is not a graduate level course (I doubt if this can even be at undergrad level)! The content could have included other topics like Logging, Recovery, Transaction Management, Distributed and Cloud databases, Examples for the features described from modern databases but apparently another course is being prepared for these. If you are looking for a solid understanding of relational databases, just read the recommended book "Database System Concepts, 7th edition (https://www.db-book.com/) and may be go through Andy Pavlo’s youtube videos instead of taking this course.

• As others said, too much time is given for C++ concepts in the lectures, thus depriving of chances to cover other database concepts. C++ must be made a pre-requisite instead. There is a programming assignment just to check C++ concepts, that could have been used for solidifying other database concepts instead.

• TAs were mostly low key on Ed during the summer semester. They took many days to respond to student enquiries. I took a couple of courses before this, and TAs in this course are the least participating ones. Ed forum did not see much activity as the TAs and Professor didn’t respond to student queries within a few days in general (I would expect TAs to field most of the questions within a day or two). There was a time when all of them went completely silent for 4-5 days!

• Lecture slides contained many mistakes from the first run of the course and were not corrected in this run too. It seems like not enough attention or effort is spent to improve the online version of this course. If you are coming to this course expecting GIOS type of rigor and discipline, you’ll be disappointed!

• Exams and exercise sheets were not that challenging. Programming assignments don’t have much guidance via comments. However if you spend like 4-5 hrs per week, you can end up getting an A easily (assuming you have C++ knowledge).

• This course’s curve is the most lenient (if you scored >= 80% you get an A grade, otherwise a B) of all the courses. 90% of the students got A! If I knew this beforehand, I’d have studied even less for the exams and exercises and I would have spent more time in reading the book.

Medium-effort, high ROI course. 4 Assignments 3 quizzes 2 exams

Great class if you are interested in understanding how databases are built from scratch. The assignments focus on implementing a beta version of BuzzDB in C++ and iteratively improving it over the course of the assignments. One of the nicer things is that there are no hidden test-cases. Passing the test-cases locally almost always guarantees a 100% on gradescope. B+ tree (assignment 3) was the most challenging one.

Quizzes: These are proctored quizzes (via honorlock) that mainly focus on the lectures. Combined make up around 25% of the grade. They aren't too bad , but there are 3-5 questions that can seem from material not included in the lectures but need general database knowledge to answer

Exams: Same as the quizzes but with the material from the papers, especially the final was mostly from material in the papers. But the professor mentions the important sections from the papers relevant to the exam. My advice would be to focus on those.

Curve 85% was an A , it looks like the course is getting tougher with time. % of As has decreased compared to previous semesters.

One of my criticisms is the weightage of assignments relative to quizzes, quizzes seem like beta exams, and sometimes I felt that they weren't really needed . Instead they could add up-to 2 extra assignments dealing with in-depth concepts from databases. This is where the course missed the bar slightly.

Overall , a great course, put in the effort and you will be fine. The professor and TAs genuinely care and want the students to succeed. My grade A - (89%)