Database
and Information Systems
Fall 2005
Towne 311, Tuesday/Thursday 1:30PM – 3:00PM
Text: Ramakrishnan
and Gehrke, Database Management Systems,
3rd
ed.
Instructor
Zachary Ives, zives@cis.upenn.edu,
(215) 746-2789
Office hours: 12:30-1:30, Thursdays, and by arrangement
Location: 576 Levine Hall N (a.k.a. GRW building)
Teaching Assistants
Weichen Wu,
wewu@seas.upenn.edu
Office hours: 1:00-2:00, Wednesdays
Location: Levine 310
Christophe Barbe,
barbe@seas.upenn.edu
Office hours: 10:30-11:30, Tuesdays
Location: Levine 310
News
- Final exam posted.
- Homework 7 solutions posted, 12/12.
- Homework 7 posted, 12/1.
- Homework 6 posted, 11/22.
- Homework 5 deadline extended to 11/23, noon
- Homework 5 posted, 11/15.
- You may find the starter code for the project, developed for CSE 330 (which shares the same project), to be useful. Get it here.
- We will be having a 24-hour take-home final exam, due by the end of our designated final exam slot.
- Midterm solutions posted, 11/10.
- Recitation on RSS and servlets: Friday 10/28, 11:30-12:30, Levine 512
- Workshop of interest: Friday 10/28, 10:30-3:30, "Database and Information Retrieval Day". Web site.
- Talk of interest: Thursday 10/27, 3PM, IRCS Conference Room, 3401 Walnut Street. Anastassia Ailamaki, CMU: "FATES: Automatically-tuned Database Storage Management".
- Homework 4 posted here.
- Homework 3 answers posted here.
- Here are midterms from 2003 and 2004.
- We have extended the deadline for HW3 to noon on Wednesday 10/19. This is a hard deadline, since we will be posting the solutions to the assignment at that time. You may turn in a hardcopy of your assignment to Zack's office in 576 Levine North, or to Cheryl Hickey's office in 502 Levine; or you may submit electronically.
- Midterm will be on 10/20. Topics will span through schema normalization, and may touch on XML at a high level (e.g., as it was discussed in lecture). There will not be coverage of XPath, XQuery, DTDs, or XML Schema.
- Sample answers to assignment two have been posted, 10/11.
- Sample answers to assignment one have been posted, 10/4.
- Our final exam date and time have been assigned: Thursday 12/15 at noon.
- Assignment 3 posted, 10/4. Homework will be due on Thursday, 10/13.
- Assignment 2 and SQL scripts posted, 9/26. Homework will be due on Tuesday, 10/4.
- Extension: Homework 1 will be due on Tuesday 9/27.
- Weichen's office hours are in a new location, posted above
- Assignment 1 posted, 9/15
- The first day of class will be Thursday, September 8th
Course Objectives
Data management is a very broad field,
covering a range of topics from data modeling to systems design
to logical models and computational complexity.
This class provides an introduction to the field,
providing a foundation in the theory of relational and XML data
design and the basics of query languages, two-tier
architectures, schema mediation, database tuning, and database
systems design. The course is not merely about
using a database, but also understanding how
they work, how they can be made to interoperate, and
what are current research topics. We will also
briefly discuss related topics such as ontologies and
information retrieval.
Prerequisites
This course will demand considerable skill
and experience in logic and algorithmic thinking, and due to
the breadth of the field, it will move very rapidly across a
variety of subjects. All students should have significant
prior experience in programming (at least one academic
year or equivalent suggested, plus CIS 500 or
equivalent).
Format
The format will be two one-and-a-half-hour
lectures a week, plus assigned readings from the textbook and
supplementary materials. For supplemental reading, a
one-page summary/review of each paper must be posted to the
course newsgroup at least one hour prior to class. There
will be regular homework assignments and a term project, plus a
midterm and a final exam.
Grading
As is usual, your final grade will be
comprised of scores on homework assignments, class
participation, exams, paper reviews, and the course project.
Breakdown: homework 30%, midterm 10%, final 20%, project 30%,
summaries/commentary 5%, participation/intangibles 5%.
Useful Resources
Supplemental Textbooks (with links
to Amazon)
(None of these are required, but some may be useful for further depth. You may be able to find some of them in the Engineering Library.)
- Garcia-Molina, Ullman, and Widom.
Database Systems: The Complete Book.
Prentice-Hall.
- Elmasri and Navathe.
Fundamentals of Database Systems, 4th ed.
Addison Wesley.
- Silberschatz, Korth, and Sudarshan.
Database System Concepts, 4th ed. McGraw Hill.
- Abiteboul, Hull, and Vianu.
Foundations of Databases. Addison Wesley.
- Abiteboul, Suciu, and Buneman.
Data on the Web. Morgan Kaufman.
- Stonebraker and Hellerstein.
Readings in Database Systems, 3rd ed. Morgan
Kaufman.
Web Links
- Oracle setup on eniac/eniac-l
(and additional links)
- Course newsgroup -- requires that
your news reader be set to
netnews.upenn.edu
.
Easiest way to access: run Pine on eniac, List Folders, go
down to the list of newsgroups (below the mail folders), hit
[A] and add the upenn.cis.cis550
newsgroup.
- SQL tutorial
- XQuery
tutorial
- Galax manual
Potentially Useful Downloads
These are only necessary if you want to download software to
run on your home machine. The CIS department servers and labs have
Galax, Eclipse, Tomcat, and MySQL installed.
Significant Dates
-
Sep. 7, First day of classes
-
Sep. 23, Add period ends
- Oct. 15, Drop period ends
-
Oct. 15 - 18, Fall break
-
Nov. 23-24, Thanksgiving break
-
Dec. 9, End of Fall term classes
-
Dec. 12-13, Reading days
-
Dec 14-21, Final exams
Back to top
Last revised: September 1, 2004