COSC 580 - Advanced Databases
Spring 2018

Instructor: Prof. Wenchao Zhou
Email: wzhou [at] cs [dot] georgetown [dot] edu
Office: St. Mary's Hall, Room 357
Office Hours: Thursday 2:00 - 3:00pm, and by appointment

Room: Intercultural Center 210B
Time: Monday and Wednesday 12:30pm - 1:45pm
Course Description

This course is a graduate-level treatment of the concepts and principles of database management systems. Topics covered include query execution and optimization, locking and concurrentcy control, logging and recovery, data extraction, data integration, and specialized DBMS case studies such as cloud databases, streaming and sensor databases, probabilistic databases, deductive databases, and graph databases. This course will involve a combination of lecturing, paper readings, and programming projects.
Textbook and Other Readings

  • The textbook for this class is Readings in Database Systems (4th Edition) by Joseph M. Hellerstein and Micheal Stonebraker. The papers in the book can be found online as well, but it is nice to have the book.
  • Additional reading material will be drawn from selected research publications (links will be listed in syllabus).
  • Grading

    Semester grades will be calculated as follows:
  • Paper presentation: 10%
  • Reading summaries: 15%
  • Midterm Exams: 30%
  • Projects: 35%
  • Class participation 10%

  • Summaries are due at 11:59pm on the night before class. There is a 25% penalty for up to 12 hours after the deadline.
    Integrity Policies

    The course follows the Departmental Honor Policy. If you are unsure whether or not a certain practice is permissible, PLEASE ask the instructor beforehand. If a cheating case is caught, the instructor is obliged to report the case to the Graduate School of Arts and Science.
    Syllabus (tentative)

    Date Topics Readings Notes
    Jan 10 Administravia and Introduction A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks
    Jan 15 Martin Luther King Day
    Jan 17 Archetypal DBMSs System R: Relational Approach to Database Management
    Jan 22 Queries: Indexing and Storage OS Support for Database Management
    Generalized Search Trees for Database Systems (Review)
    Jan 24 Queries: Execution Graefe Query Execution Survey
    Jan 29 Queries: Execution
    Jan 31 Queries: Optimization An Overview of Query Optimization in Relational Systems
    Access Path Selection in a Relational DBMS (Review)
    Feb 5 Queries: Optimization The Volcano Optimizer Generator
    Extensible Query Processing in Starburst
    Feb 7 Locking and concurency Granularity of Locks and Degrees of Consistency in a Shared DB (Review)
    Feb 12 Recovery Recovery in the ARIES System
    Feb 14 Review
    Feb 19 President's Day
    Fed 21 Midterm 1
    Feb 26 Distributed Databases R* Optimizer Validation and Performance Evaluation
    Feb 28 Distributed Databases
    Mar 5 Spring Break
    Mar 7 Spring Break
    Mar 12 Data Extraction Building Structured Web Community Portals (Review)
    Mar 14 Data Integration Information Manifold
    Mar 19 Schema Mapping Reconciling Schemas of Disparate Data Sources (Review)
    Mar 21 Adaptive Query Processing Adaptive Query Processing Survey
    Mar 26 Search and Cloud Databases
    Mar 28 Key-Value Store Dynamo: Amazon's highly available key-value store (Review)
    Apr 2 Easter
    Apr 4 Buffer and Review
    Apr 9 Midterm 2
    Apr 11 Stream Databases Stanford STREAM
    Apr 16 Probabilistic Databases Efficient Query Evaluation on Probabilistic Databases (Review)
    Apr 18 Probabilistic Databases
    Apr 23 Deductive Databases A Survey of Deductive Database Systems (Review Section 1-3)
    Apr 25 Project Presentation