CSE 462/562: Database Systems (Fall 2025) - TacoDB project

Overview

• This is a semester-long course project of building a mini RDBMS Taco-DB in C++, divided into six subprojects. You may work in a team of up to three students. The tasks remain the same regardless of your team size. Please refer to the project 1 web page (link from the navigation bar at the top of this page) for details.
• There will be four graded written assignments. They must be completed independently.
• Academic Integrity Policy (The TL;DR version):
  1. It is allowed and encouraged to post public messages over Piazza to seek clarification and discuss questions in the written assignments and projects, as long as you do not post your solution directly in these posts.
  2. You may only discuss the project within your project group for coding and implementation. For your homework assignments (including the project write-ups), you must complete it on your own, without discussing with your teammate. You may not copy or paraphrase solution from other students or any other sources (including but not limited to search engine, online Q&A websites, tutoring services, generative AI software).
  3. Following the CSE Academic Integrity Policy, all violations will be reported to Office of Academic Integrity (OAI). All students involved will receive an F grade, except a few limited circumstances, such as the violation is due to accidental and honest human errors, and does not provide unfair advantage.
  
  Please review and follow the detailed academic integrity policy listed at the bottom of this page.
• Late submission policy: You have up to three grace days in total across all the projects and written assignments. In addition, you may only use at most one grace day for each project or written assignment. There is no penalty for late submissions during the allowed grace period. However, no credit will be given if you make a late submission that falls outside the allowed grace period. If you have a project teammate and any of you make a late submission for a project submission, any grace days used will count towards the used grace days for both team members.
  It is your own responsibility to keep track of the number of grace days used. Project and homework assignments may still be graded whenever feasible, and the feedback and grades will be posted as Autolab, test log website, or UBLearns as is. You will see a negative adjustment that deducts your received project grade after the initial grades are posted, if your submissions are outside the allowed grace period.

• Projects (45% + 17%), break-down:
  
  • Project 0: project setup and team sign-up. (0.1%)
  • Project 1: POSIX I/O (1.9%)
  • Project 2: Data layout (9%)
  • Project 3: Single-table query processing (8%)
  • Project 4: B-tree index and index scan (13.3% + 5% in bonus)
  • Project 5: Join algorithms (12.7%)
  • Project 6 (Bonus): Query optimization (12%)
• Project write-ups: 10% in total

Projects

Academic Integrity Policy

Academic integrity is critical to the learning process. It is your responsibility as a student to complete your work in an honest fashion, upholding the expectations your individual instructors have for you in this regard. The ultimate goal is to ensure that you learn the content in your courses in accordance with UB’s academic integrity principles, regardless of whether instruction is in-person or remote. Thank you for upholding your own personal integrity and ensuring UB’s tradition of academic excellence. You should get familiar with the departmental and the university academic integrity policies and procedures:

• Undergraudate Academic Integrity Policy
• Undergraduate Academic Integrity Procedure
• Graduate Academic Integrity Policy
• Graduate Academic Integrity Procedure

Academic integrity policies specifics to this course (please read carefully): you may NOT share code with from anyone about your course projects except for your teammate. We also require all students, whether enrolled, dropped or resigned from the class, to keep your course project repository inaccessible to public indefinitely, and never share it with any current students or future students who may take the course. When you look up online materials for the course project, please exercise common sense in terms of what is allowed and what is not allowed (e.g., cppreference/cplusplus.com are fine to look at, while posting questions directly related to the project on StackOverFlow would not be acceptable). Examples that we consider as academic integrity violations include but are not limited to:

1. Copying any part of other team's code implementation or code found online in the course project, regardless of whether it is a verbatim copy or a modified copy;
2. Collaborate with other teams in the course project; (Writing code together with students from other teams or exchanging code is not allowed. Discussion on task and system specification, algorithms and system designs, on the other hand, is allowed and encouraged);
3. Making your course project repository or any copy of it available to any current or future students of the course;
4. Submitting work that is not created by you or your team, including deriving your solutions based on materials from search engines, tutoring services, Q&A websites, and/or those generated by generative AI software (e.g., ChatGPT);
5. Collaborate with anyone in the written assignments; (Developing solutions together with fellow classmates or exchanging solutions is not allowed. Discussion on homework problems, course materials, on the other hand, is allowed and encouraged).
6. Cheating or referring to any material not permitted in the exams and written assignments.

Consistent with the CSE Academic Integrity Policy, we have zero tolerance towards academic integrity violations. Any academic integrity violation will result in an F grade for all students involved and will be referred to the Office of Academic Integrity. The only exception when the violation is accidental and does not provide any unfair advantage to any of the students involved, in which case you may receive a reduction in grade in the particular assignment/exam/project.