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Advanced Databases

Semester 2

Lecturer: Stratis Viglas
Informatics Forum, IF 5.11
Tel: +44 (0) 131 650 5183

Lectures:
Monday, 11:10-12:00, Seminar Room G.15, Medical School, Teviot
Thursday, 11:10-12:00, Lecture Theatre 3, 7 Bristo Square

Office hours:
Monday, Thursday, 12:00-13:00, IF 5.11.
(Though you can always send e-mail or drop by if you have questions.)

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Contents

• Pre-requisites
• Announcements
• Slides
• Schedule
• Syllabus
• Reading List
• Assignments
• Software

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Pre-requisites

It is recommended that undergraduate students have taken the Database Systems course. Postgraduate students are recommended to have taken an equivalent course to Database Systems during their undergraduate degree. If you have not taken Database Systems or an equivalent course and still want to enroll in Advanced Databases please contact the instructor to obtain consent.

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Announcements

Watch this space for any announcements concerning the course.

• The mailing list for the course is adbs-students at inf dot ed dot ac dot uk.
• The two coursework assignments have been announced. The first one is an implementation of external sorting and hash based grouping, while the second one an implementation of merge-join and Grace hash join. The deadlines are 13 February 2015 and 13 March 2015 respectively.
• The lab sessions are as follows:
  • Monday 3pm-5pm AT 4.12
  • Tuesday 1pm-3pm AT 5.08
  You need to attend one session per week. The labs will run in weeks 3 and 4.
• The deadline for the first assignment has been extended to 23 February 2015, 11am.

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Lecture Slides

The entire set of slides for the course can be found below:

• Online version, suitable for viewing (NB: the file is big!)
• Hand-out version suitable for viewing but without the animations, and printing one slide per page.

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Lecture Schedule

Lecture number	Covered material	Additional notes
1	Overview, introduction to query evaluation
2	Introduction to relational databases, indexing
3	B+trees, extendible hashing
4	Extendible and linear hashing
5	R-trees
6	External mergesort
7	External mergesort (cont.), physical plans	Graefe's paper on query evaluation in relational databases.
8	Execution models
9	Nested loops join, sort-merge join
10	Sort-merge join, hash joins	Original System-R paper
11	Query optimisation
12	Histograms and dynamic programming
13	Dynamic programming (cont.), query optimisation wrap-up
14	Transaction processing
15	General locking algorithms, B+-tree locking
16	ARIES recovery algorithm
17	Parallel database systems	Last lecture

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Syllabus

During the course we will be mainly dealing with database implementation issues and database technology in general. The material will cover storage structures, query evaluation and execution, query optimisation, concurrency control, transaction processing, recovery, and parallel databases.

Reading List

Raghu Ramakrishnan and Johannes Gehrke, Database Management Systems. (Third Edition) McGraw-Hill 2003.

Note that this is not required text; it is merely recommended. You should be fine with the slides used during the lectures alone, along with any handouts.

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Assignments

Both assignments will be available in due course.

Marks and feedback for both assignments will be returned two weeks after submission.

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Software

In the context of the course, we will be using an experimental relational database system, written in Java, called attica.

Attica can be found at this location. Visit the page to obtain the software and installation instructions.