Instructor: Michael Stonebraker, stonebraker@lcs.mit.edu Office: NE43-540 (inside NE43-501). Office hours Thursday 10-12.

Grading: There will be a final, counting 40% of your grade, 4 written assignments, counting 30%, and an implementation project, counting 30%. Project can either be a DBMS application or a modification to POSTGRES.

TA: There is no TA; you are pretty much on your own.

Course Philosophy: This is a graduate course that covers what every serious DBMS professional should know. It assumes an undergraduate level DBMS course as background. If you have not had this background, you will have to read one of the standard texts (Ullman&Widom, Ramakrishnan, Date) in parallel. This is not a course on recent literature in a specific topic area.

Topic Outline: This course will cover the important subject matter relating to the architecture of database systems. We treat data models and query languages, including hierarchical, network, relational and the recent W3C proposals in this area. Also discussed are the implementation of database systems, including query processing, view management, transaction processing, access methods, buffering and storage management. Wrinkles appropriate to read-only data (warehouses), dedicated hardware (database machines) and distributed data will also be covered. We then discuss the impact the web is having on DBMS implementations, and finish with issues from several niche markets, including geographic information, real-time sensor data, time series data, and media asset management

Reading: You willbe responsible for much of "The Red Book" (Readings in Database Systems, edited by Stonebraker and Hellerstein). Lectures will typically augment a topic, rather than present the paper(s). Optional text which you should consider reading in parallel with this course if you didn't take an undergraduate course in Database systems is Database Management Systems by Raghu Ramakrishnan, University of Wisconsin--Madison Johannes Gehrke, University of Wisconsin--Madison, ISBN: 0-07-232206-3. A typical undergraduate course covers much of the first 20 chapters.