CSE 462/562: Database Systems (Fall 2024)

Course Description

Welcome to CSE462/562 Database Systems of Fall 2024. Database Management Systems (DBMS) are an important piece of software widely used in various data intensive applications. No matter what data model or query language it adopts, there are principles and methodologies commonly found in virtually all DBMS, in order to support efficient and fault-tolerant data storage, query and management. In this course, we will examine the internals of a traditional Relational DataBase Management System (RDBMS) and discuss the common principles and methodologies that may be useful in many other database and data processing systems beyond RDBMS. The students will also gain practical experience of efficient data management through a semester-long project of implementing various components of a mini RDBMS.

The main topics include database storage management, query processing, query optimization, transaction processing, concurrency control and recovery in RDBMS. Please note that this is not a course on database design or database application development -- those are covered in CSE460/560 Data Models and Query Languages. We will briefly review the necessary background on the relational data model and the SQL language in the first a few lectures but students are expected to understand relational algebra and SQL before this course.

Logistics

• Location and time: Nsc 205, Tuesday & Thursday 5:00 pm to 6:20 pm.
• Instructor: Zhuoyue Zhao.
• TA: Congying Wang
• Grader: Gianna Bossoreale
• Office hours (subject to change, please check Piazza for updates):
  • Tuesday, 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM, Davis 338Y (Congying)
  • Wednesday, 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM, Davis 338I (Zhuoyue, shared with CSE 662)
  • Thursday, 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM, Davis 338Y (Congying)
  • No office hours on the following days: 8/27, 8/28, 8/29, 10/15, 11/27, 11/28.
• Annoucement and discussion board: Piazza.
  You're encouraged to use Piazza for public discussions with students in class.
  Please send private messages on Piazza to the instructor and all TA/graders if you have any requests or questions regarding your projects/assignments/exams. Please do not send emails.
• No mandatory textbook.
• Optional textbook (but strongly recommended):
  
  • Database System Concepts, Seventh Edition, by Abraham Silberschatz and Henry Korth and S. Sudarshan.
• (New) We will use minsky.cse.buffalo.edu for project development, debugging, testing and grading. See Project 0 for details.
• Grades for homework assignments, project and exams will be posted on UB Learns.
• Link to lecture recoding: Panopto CSE462/562 FA24
• Important dates:
  
  • Add/Drop Deadline: 9/3/2024
  • Mid-term exam: 10/24/2024, 5:05 PM - 6:20 PM, Nsc 205 (updated)
  • Last day to resign from the course: 11/13/2024
  • Final exam: 12/12/2024, 7:30 PM - 9:00 PM, Nsc 205
  • Project due dates: please refer to the project pages
• Exam conflicts: You must attend the mid-term and final exams on the scheduled time. Unfortunately, we are unable to offer alternative time for mid-term exams due to the limited availability of classrooms. You may request an alternative date/time if you have final exam conflicts as defined here, and you MUST notify the instructor by 9/9/2024 (through a Piazza private message).
  We may not be able to accomodate your request if you do not notify the instructor within the first two weeks of the semester. If you are scheduled on an alternative date for the final exam, you may still opt for the original date at any time. Please notify us at least one week before the alternative exam date.
• Link to the full syllabus document syllabus. (check this for the grading policies)

Course Requirements

• In-person attendance is required. The lectures are recorded but loss of internet connection or other unforeseeable technical issues may impact the availability of recordings from time to time. We do not offer live-streaming of the classes.
• We have a mid-term exam and a final exam. They are both open-book, but you may only bring paper-copy of the course slides, the written assignments and solutions, the optional textbook, as well as your lecture notes. You may not use any electronic devices except a calculator.
• There 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 two 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 must independently develop the solution, within your project group for project, and on your own for homework assignments. 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.

Grading Policy

Please refer to the PDF syllabus for the tentative assignment of letter grades. Grade break-down:

• Mid-term exam (15%)
• Final exam (20%)
• Homework assignments (20%)
  
  • 6 Homework assignments, 5% each
  • The lowest 2 are excluded from the final grade
• 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%)

Course Schedule

Hint: If you find the last update date of a slide deck is later than the one you previously downloaded and you opened the slides within the browser, you may want to force a refresh using Ctrl + F5.

The following schedule is subject to adjustments throughout the semester.

Lectures

Written Assignments

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.

Accessibility Resources

If you have any disability which requires reasonable accommodations to enable you to participate in this course, please contact the Office of Accessibility Resources in 60 Capen Hall, 716-645-2608. The office will provide you with information and review appropriate arrangements for reasonable accommodations, which can be found on the web at this link. Please also notify the instructor as soon as possible to make reasonable arrangement early.