Suggested Syllabus for a One Semester Systems Oriented Course

The following syllabus is designed for a course where the goal is to teach students the fundamental concepts underlying database system design, including not only the design of applications using databases, but also covering the fundamental implementation techniques used in database systems. The amount of material that needs to be covered will make such a course a rather intensive one to cover in one semester, and students must be prepared for the course load.

• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Relational Model
• Chapter 3: SQL
• Chapter 4: Advanced SQL
  Sections 4.6 onwards may be omitted.
• Chapter 6: Entity-Relationship Model
• Chapter 7: Relational Database Design
• Chapter 8: Application Design and Development
  This chapter may be covered in brief, without going into details
• Chapter 10: XML
  This chapter may be covered in brief, without going into details
• Chapter 11: Storage and File Structure
• Chapter 12: Indexing and Hashing
• Chapter 13: Query Processing
• Chapter 14: Query Optimization
• Chapter 15: Transactions
  Section 15.8 (Testing for Serializability) may be omitted.
• Chapter 16: Concurrency Control
  Section 16.3 (Validation-Based Protocols), Section 16.8 (Weak Levels of Consistency) and Section 16.9 (Concurrency in Index Structures) may be omitted.
• Chapter 17: Recovery System
  Section 17.8 (Advanced Recovery Techniques) may be omitted.
• Assignments/Project
  The course should be supplemented by assignments and a project. The assignments can involve the design of a schema for a realistic application, and coding and executing SQL queries on a relational database system.

  The project could involve implementing one or more component(s) or a database system, as an index structure, or lock manager, or relation manager (providing an iterator interface), or a simple relational algebra evaluation engine.

  More ambitious courses may wish to have projects based on adding functionality to the PostgreSQL open-source database system. Chapter 26 provides an overview of PostgreSQL that students should read before studying the PostgreSQL code.

Last updated April 2005.