Class Information

Room: Science Center 246
Class: Tuesday, Thursday 2:40–3:55pm
Professor: Charlie Garrod
Office: Science Center 255
Phone: 6071
Office hours: Wednesdays 2 - 3:30, or you can stop by whenever my door is open.

Welcome to CS97. This year's topic is data management systems. Our goal is to understand the fundamental problems of data management and the roles played by modern data management systems. With popular sites like Google and Facebook, GPS-enabled mobile computers in our pockets, and an increasing use of networked devices and sensors in our everyday environment, you are surely aware of the explosion in the amount of data we collect and share. In this course, we will study the question of how this data should be stored and accessed, so that the data remains valid and useful as it is updated and used by many simultaneous users.

Early in this course we will focus on traditional relational database systems, including the relational model, transactions, consistency, concurrency control, indexes, and query processing. As the semester progresses we'll increasingly consider systems with non-traditional requirements, implementations, or features, including stream databases, non-relational systems, and relaxed consistency models.

Your work in this course will consist of regular out-of-class reading and written reactions to the reading, presentation of papers in class, one or more short lab assignments, and a longer-term research project and paper. By the end of the course you will demonstrate the following skills:

• Understand the fundamental problems in data management and analyze various solutions to these problems.
• Analyze and critcally discuss research papers in writing and in class.
• Formulate and evaluate a hypothesis by proposing, implementing, and evaluating a project.
• Write a coherent, complete paper describing and evaluating a project.
• Orally present a clear and accessible summary of research work.

There is no required textbook for this course. Many of our readings will come from Database Management Systems by Ramakrishnan and Gehrke or from Readings in Database Systems by Hellerstein and Stonebraker. I will provide online links or copies of all required reading; you probably will need to access these links and copies from the on-campus network. Also, a copy of Ramakrishnan and Gehrke is on Honors reserve at the Cornell Library.

Grading

Grades will be weighted as follows:

20%	Paper reaction notes and participation
15%	Paper presentations
10%	Short lab assignment(s)
55%	Course project
	5% Proposal and lit review 10% Checkpoints and rough draft 10% Reviewer comments 10% Project presentation 20% Final paper

Academic Integrity

Strong academic integrity is expected of every student. Plagiarism, cheating, and academic dishonesty will be reported to the College Judiciary Committee and dealt with severely. You may not hand in work done by someone else as your own. You may discuss ideas and problems with others on a general level and such discussions are encouraged, but you must credit any collaborators or resources used in the completion of your assignments and projects. Please see me if there are any questions about what is permissible.

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Schedule

This schedule is subject to -- and will -- change as needed during the semester:

WEEK	DAY	ANNOUNCEMENTS	TOPIC	HOMEWORK & READING
1	Aug 31		Intro	Week 1 readings Lab 1
	Sep 02		The relational model, Ryan's summary of Codd, Ashley's summary of "What Goes Around Comes Around"
2	Sep 07		Database internals, Max and Nick's summary of Anatomy...	Week 2 readings
	Sep 09	Drop/Add ends (Sep 10)	Access methods and indexes, part 1, Ross and Alex's summary of R&G Ch. 8-9
3	Sep 14		Access methods and indexes, part 2, Dougal's summary of R trees and R* trees	Week 3 readings
	Sep 16		Memory management
4	Sep 21		Join processing, Emanne's summary of Shapiro	Week 4 readings
	Sep 23		Query optimization, Justin's summary of Selinger et al.
5	Sep 28	Project pre-proposal meetings	Transactions and concurrency control, Ryan's summary of R&G Ch. 16	Week 5 readings
	Sep 30		Optimistic concurrency control, Ross's summary of Kung and Robinson
6	Oct 05		Crashes and recovery, Ashley's summary of the recovery process	Week 6 readings
	Oct 07	Full project proposals due	Distributed transactions
	Oct 12	Fall Break
	Oct 14
7	Oct 19		Replication	Week 7 readings
	Oct 21		Consensus
8	Oct 26		Column-oriented DBMSs, Emanne's summary of C-Store	Week 8 readings
	Oct 28		H-Store, Max's summary of H-Store
9	Nov 02		PNUTS	Week 9 readings
	Nov 04	Progress presentations Last day to declare CR/NC or W (Nov 05)	Progress presentations
10	Nov 09	Progress presentations	Progress presentations, continued	Week 10 readings
	Nov 11		Bigtable
11	Nov 16		Streaming DBs	None
	Nov 18		No class
12	Nov 23	Paper draft due	The CAP theorem
	Nov 25	Thanksgiving
13	Nov 30		Staged software systems	Week 13 readings
	Dec 02	Peer feedback due	Pig Latin
14	Dec 07	Final presentations (Dec 10) Final paper due (Dec 16)	TBD	None