CS 848
Modern Database Systems
(Winter 2015)

M. Tamer Özsu
tamer.ozsu@uwaterloo.ca
DC 3350

Lecture times: Tuesday 2:00-4:50PM

Lecture location: DC 3313

Calendar Description

This is a seminar course that will cover the current landscape in database management. The term "modern" is used to emphasize the new directions that new and established database system vendors are taking to address new challenges.

References

There is no textbook required, but the following might be useful in certain parts -- it is in the library, so no need to purchase it:

Principles of Distributed Database Systems, 3rd edition, M. Tamer Özsu and Patrick Valduriez, Springer, 2011.

For the most part, we will read papers from literature. For access to papers, you can consult the DBLP online bibliography:

• DBLP Computer Science Bibliography

Workload and Evaluation (tentative and may change depending on class size)

• Two critical reviews of research papers (20%) (email me PDF file)
  • First review due by 28 February
  • Second review due by 3 April
• Class presentation (20%)
  • Each student will present two papers in class, critique it, and lead the Q&A on it (30 minutes+15 minutes Q&A).
  • This talk is supposed to be an in depth description and analysis of the papers.
  • The format should be similar to a conference presentation.
  • The evaluation form (see below) is a good guide in preparing your presentations.
  • It is the responsibility of the presenter to fully explain each paper. Therefore, you are expected to know and understand all the aspects of the material, which may require you to do additional background reading.
  • See schedule below (which will be filled in as we go along)...
• Class participation (20%) - Participation mark will be determined by the following:
  • Participation in the discussions in class (we'll have about 10 minutes discussion for each paper).
  • Each student will read each paper to be presented and write a short review of it (3/4 to 1 page). The guidelines for these short reviews are here. Please note that these are different than the critiques mentioned above.
  • Each student has to fill out an evaluation form for each presentation and mail it to me by 5PM on Sunday of the week when the presentation is given. You can download the PDF or Word version
• Term project (40%)
  • Done in groups of two.
  • Each group needs to find a topic to research and write a report.
  • See here for further details

Course Outline

• Introduction to database system functionality
• NewSQL systems
• NoSQL systems
• MapReduce-based data management
• Distributed data stores
• Main memory & column-based DBMSs
• Graph processing
• RDF data management

Schedule

The weekly schedule is here.

Administrative details

Please review the materials concerning academic integrity and academic honesty.