Advanced database technology, Spring 2004

[Schedule] [Course description] [Course goal] [Literature] [Prerequisites] [Course format] [Examination] [Lecturers]

News

The extra exercise session on June 3 will be in room 2.51 at 13.00.

The curriculum, and selected exercises are now avaliable.

Check out the updated project and thesis proposals.

Problems from the exam, summer 2003, will be used for hand-ins.

SQL for web nerds is a good, practically oriented, guide to SQL and relational databases.

Slides in Powerpoint format now available.

Schedule

Lectures and exercises on Thursdays. Lectures and exercises will be mixed throughout the time allocated for the course.

The schedule is preliminary. It will be updated during the course. More detailed reading directions will also be provided.

Date Time Subject Literature Exercises / hand-ins Place
Feb. 5 9.00-12.00 Introduction. Recap of database background (slides). Overview of lectures (slides). (Based on selected sections of the first part of GUW - not curriculum.)   1.60
Feb. 12 10.00-15.00 Data storage devices, I/O model (slides). GUW 11.1-11.5; [Sanders03, 1.3-1.5], [MaheshwariZeh03, 3.1-3.2]. Week 2 1.60
Feb. 19 10.00-15.00 Representing data elements (slides). Index structures (slides). GUW 12, 13.0-2, [Pagh03, sec. 1 ], [CLRS01, p. 405-9] (alternatively [CLR90, p. 356-60]). Week 3 1.60
Feb. 26   No lecture.      
March 4 10.00-15.00 B-trees. Hash indexes. (slides). GUW 13.3-13.4, [Pagh03, sec. 3.0-3.2, 4] Week 5 1.60
March 11 10.00-15.00 Cancelled     1.60
March 18 10.00-15.00 Implementation of relational operations I. (slides). GUW 15.0-15.8 Week 7 1.60
March 25 10.00-15.00 Implementation of relational operations II (slides, more slides) Dealing with system failures (slides) GUW 16.2-7, 17.0, 17.1, 17.2.4+5, 17.4 Week 8 1.60
Apr. 1 10.00-15.00 Media failures (slides). Concurrency control(slides). GUW 11.6, 11.7.0-3. GUW 18.0-8, 19.3 Week 9 1.60
Apr. 8   Easter      
Apr. 15 10.00-15.00 Geometric index structures (slides). GUW 14.0-14.1, (14.2-14.3 recommended reading), [Arge01, sec. 1, 2.1 (persistent B-trees), 3-4 (static versions only), 4.1, 9] Week 10 1.60
Apr. 22 10.00-15.00 Text indexing (slides) [KarkkainenRao03, sec. 7.1-7.4] Week 11 1.60
Apr. 29 10.00-15.00; Data mining (slides, more slides, more slides, yet more slides). Course summary (slides). GUW 20.6, [AgrawalSrikant94, all except 3.3], [Ullman00] and [BrinPage98, sec. 1, 2, 4.2] No new exercises. 1.60
June 3 13.00-16.00 Extra exercise session.     2.51
June 10   Exam.      

Literature:

Course description

The course will focus on implementation aspects of databases. In particular, we focus on situations where there are large amounts of data, or where advanced queries are needed, and show how to implement efficient data structures to address these needs.

Note that this is a theoretical course. There will not be any implementation or exercises using computers.

See the schedule above for more details.

Literature

Database Systems: The Complete Book by Hector Garcia-Molina, Jeff Ullman, and Jennifer Widom, 2002. Copies for the course are on sale from Samfundslitteratur. (Note that the "international edition" is less expensive.) Unless stated otherwise, the example material in the book is not part of the curriculum (however, it could help you understand the main text). In addition to the book there will be handouts, specified for each lecture in the schedule above.

Course goal

The goal of the course is to provide the student with an understanding of the inner workings of modern data storage and retrieval systems. After the course, the student should be able to analyze a given database task, and suggest an alternative implementation if standard database solutions are not efficient. In particular, the student should be able to:

Prerequisites

The students should before the course This can be obtained through the courses introduction to algorithms and data structures (IADS) and introduction to databases (IDBI) or database systems (DBS).

Course format

Teaching consists of lectures and exercises in English.

Mandatory hand-ins

There will be 5 mandatory hand-ins during the course to be solved individually or in groups of two students. Assignments are given in connection with the lectures (and announced on the home page) and are due before a lecture (normally 2 weeks later). Every assigment is graded on a scale from A-E (A=very good, B=good, C=acceptable, D=not good enough, E=not handed in/late hand-in), and students must achieve A, B, or C on at least 4 out of 5 assignments. If you are not able to hand in in time, for some reason, inform the teacher as soon as possible. It is allowed to discuss assignments with other students, but the solutions must be prepared in groups of size at most 2. Hand-ins may be in Danish or English, and are to be handed in on paper - either directly to one of the lecturers or in the mail boxes in the information office.

Examination

Written exam, 4 hours, scheduled for June 10. Mandatory hand-ins required to enter exam.

Lecturers

Rasmus Pagh
Office: 1.23
Phone: 38 16 89 34
Email: pagh@itu.dk
 Anna Östlin
Office: 1.23
Phone: 38 16 88 21
Email: annao@itu.dk