Database Systems Course Overview

The course is 15-445/645 Database Systems, and the instructor is Andy, who is dedicating the course to his mentor Leon Wurman.

Leon Wurman was one of the original data scientists, had five degrees from MIT, and was a pioneer in the field of data science.

The course is sponsored by DB, who will provide funding for course development and give a guest lecture later in the semester.

The instructor, Andy, only cares about two things in life: his wife and databases.

Andy gets excited when talking about databases and may speak quickly, so students are encouraged to raise their hand and ask him to slow down if they are confused.

Andy will not answer questions about course material or lectures after class, so students should ask questions during the lecture.

The course agenda for the first day includes discussing logistics, course plan, and expectations, as well as introducing the relational model and relational algebra.

There is a C++ self-assessment that should take 2-3 minutes to complete, and students who are not comfortable with C++ may not be in the right course.

The waitlist for the course is currently at 150 people, and the max capacity is around 102-103 students.

Students on the waitlist will be enrolled in the course based on the order they complete the first homework assignment with a 100% score.

The course focuses on the design principles of disk-oriented relational database management systems.

The course is not about building database applications or modeling databases, but rather about building the underlying software to manage databases.

Students who are interested in high-level database concepts may want to consider alternative courses, such as CMU 95-7 or 3 in Heinz College.

The course is project-intensive, and students will learn about storage, query execution, transaction management, concurrency control, and recovery.

The course will also cover distributed databases and cloud databases, and will feature a guest lecture from DB.

Students will have the opportunity to work on a project building their own database storage manager from scratch using C++11.

The course policy and schedule are available on the course website, and discussions and announcements will be made on Piazza.

There is a textbook for the course, "Database Systems" by Avi Silberschatz and Hank Korth, and lecture notes will be provided for each class.

Grades will be distributed as follows: 45% for projects, 25% for the midterm, 20% for the final exam, and 10% for homework assignments.

There will be five homework assignments throughout the semester, and they will be submitted through AutoLab or GradeScope.

Projects will build on each other, and students will be required to implement different components of a database management system.

Late policy allows for four slip days for both homeworks and projects, and students should mark down how many late days they have used.

All work should be done individually, and students should not copy source code from others or the internet.

There are opportunities for students to get involved in database research at Carnegie Mellon, including attending the CMU database research group meetings or working on the development of a new database system called Peloton.- The speaker discusses an advanced class in the spring based on a system called Peloton, which involves working on a commercial-grade database project.

Students working on the database project have job opportunities as companies are eager to hire them due to their skills.

The project name might change as it currently shares its name with an exercise bike brand.

The speaker mentions rewriting a storage engine over the summer and integrating old code into the new repository, offering early involvement opportunities.

A seminar series on hardware-accelerated databases will be held on Thursdays in the CIC building for the fall semester.

A database is defined as an organized collection of interrelated data that models aspects of the real world, managed by a database management system (DBMS).

Databases are essential components of most technological applications, as they store and manage data for various purposes.

The relational model, introduced by Ted Codd in the 1970s, led to the development of relational algebra, a set of operators to manipulate data in relations.

Relational algebra operators include Select, Project, Union, Intersection, Difference, Product, and Join, used to retrieve and manipulate data in relations.

Sequel (SQL) is the standard language for querying relational databases, allowing users to declare what data they want without specifying how to retrieve it.

Sequel is widely used in database systems, and many systems are adding SQL support to ensure compatibility and ease of use.

Sequel allows users to write high-level queries that the database system optimizes for efficient execution, based on the relational algebra operations.