COP5725 Advanced Database Systems (Fall 2023)

Course Description

Do you know how many Turing Awards were given to the database field? For what contributions?

The dominating relational database system, which we take for granted now, was deemed impossible to implement and difficult to use in its early days. What breakthroughs turned the rather mathematical idea into reality? What are the classic milestones that pioneered and shaped the landscape of the data management field?

Do you know that, although relational database systems are almost commodity software now, researchers are even more fascinated by general data management issues? The new challenges naturally arise in the junction of databases vs. information retrieval, structured vs. unstructured data, querying vs. searching, the Web, and many more novel contexts. What are the current topics and future agenda?

To build the essential foundation as a stepping-stone to data management research, this course exposes students to advanced database system design principles and concepts. We will broadly explore the classic as well as more recent research work. Our agenda will be two fold:

As an advanced course for databases, COP5725 studies the fundamentals of implementing relational database management systems from the system perspective (i.e., how to design and implement a database system), the course will study data storage, representation, advanced indexing, query planning, processing, and optimization.
As the first graduate course in the general data management field, COP5725 also studies the advanced topics beyond traditional relational database systems, such as parallel/distributed data processing, data mining, similarity search, and Web data analytics.

Basic Information

Administrivia

Time: Tuesday/Thursday 9:45am--11am, starting from Tuesday 8/29, 2023
Venue: SCN (Duxbury Hall) 0214 (map)
Instructor: Peixiang Zhao
- Office: LOV 361
- Email: zhao AT cs DOT fsu DOT edu
- Office hours: Tuesday/Thursday right after the classes
Teaching Assistants:
- Jiyang Bai (Paper Summary, Homework)
- Email: bai AT cs DOT fsu DOT edu
- Office hours: Wednesday 1pm - 2pm at the Majors Lab
- Bowen Li (Project)
- Email: bli AT cs DOT fsu DOT edu
- Office hours: Monday 11am - 12pm at the Majors Lab
Web site: http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~zhao/cop5725/main.html

Textbooks and readings

(Required textbook) Database Systems: The Complete Book 2nd edition, by Hector Garcia-Molina, Jeff Ullman and Jennifer Widom. ISBN: 978-0131873254, Prentice Hall, 2008.
(Recommended reference) Database Management Systems 3rd edition, by Raghu Ramakrishnan and Johannes Gehrke. ISBN: 978-0072465631, McGraw-Hill, 2002.
(Recommended reference) Readings in Database Systems 5th edition, by Peter Bailis, Joseph Hellerstein, and Michael Stonebraker. ISBN: 978-0262693141, The MIT Press, 2005.

Prerequisites

COP4710: Database Systems and COP4530: Data Structures and Algorithms or equivalents courses are required. Furthermore, students should come with good programming skills. If you are not sure whether you have the right background, please contact the instructor.

Note: We will not cover programming-specific issues in this course.

Format and Activities

This course will draw (advanced) materials from the textbook as well as database literature. Students will study the materials, read classic papers and submit summaries, do a presentation in the class, complete a significant research project, and take a final exam at the end of the semester.

Lectures and reading: we encourage (and appreciate!) students to attend classes, because effective lectures rely on students' participation to raise questions and contribute in discussions. We will provide lecture notes and related papers before class, which will be posted on the schedule page.

Read the textbook and papers for the required reading before lectures, and study them more carefully after class. Please note that all the required readings are fair materials for exams. These materials may not be fully covered in lectures. Our lectures are intended to motivate as well as provide a road map for your reading-- with the limited lecture time we may not be able to cover everything in the readings.

Questions: We encourage students discussing their questions and problems first with peers and classmates. This way, you can get immediate help and also learn to communicated "professionally" with your classmates. In any case for more thorough discussion, come to the office hours of TA's and the instructor's. Any announcement will be posted on the announcement page. Make sure to check it frequently enough to stay informed.

Assignment: There will be two or three written assignments spaced out over the course of the semester. All the assignments should be done individually by the students. Assignments should be submitted on the due dates via Canvas.

Exam: There will be a final exam held at the end of the semester.

Paper summaries: There will be a series of (five or six) papers for careful studying, which represent our selection from both classic and state-of-the-art literature in database and data management areas. Each student will submit a one-or-two page summary for each paper in the due date during the class.

Paper presentation: To enrich our channels of learning, we ask our students to choose one paper related to her/his project and present it in the class. The paper should be chosen from the designated conferences/journals and published no earlier than 2014. Each student will sign up and present in the second half of the semester. Each group/student will spend 15 minutes for presentation and Q&A, and will lead and moderate discussions in the class.

Projects: There will be a semester-long project, which involves significant database or data related research. The project will be structured with several milestones due in the course of the semester, leading to a conference/journal-paper-style final report (and auxiliary materials, such as source code and datasets) near the end of the semester.

Course Policies

General Policy

University Attendance Policy: Excused absences include documented illness, deaths in the family and other documented crises, call to active military duty or jury duty, religious holy days, and official University activities. These absences will be accommodated in a way that does not arbitrarily penalize students who have a valid excuse. Consideration will also be given to students whose dependent children experience serious illness.
Academic Honor Policy: The Florida State University Academic Honor Policy outlines the University's expectations for the integrity of students' academic work, the procedures for resolving alleged violations of those expectations, and the rights and responsibilities of students and faculty members throughout the process. Students are responsible for reading the Academic Honor Policy and for living up to their pledge to "...be honest and truthful and... [to] strive for personal and institutional integrity at Florida State University." (Florida State University Academic Honor Policy, found at here.)
Syllabus Change Policy: Except for changes that substantially affect implementation of the evaluation (grading) statement, this syllabus is a guide for the course and is subject to change with advance notice.
You are allowed to discuss written assignments, paper summaries and your project ideas, however, any such discussion must be clearly acknowledged on the submitted solution or write-up. Your solution should be stapled together and neatly prepared;
The project will be carried out in a team-based fashion. No inter-team collaboration is allowed;
You are bound to attend all lectures unless notifying the instructor in advance with reasonable excuses.

Collaboration/Academic Honesty

All course participants must adhere to the academic honor code of FSU which is available in the student handbook. All instances of academic dishonesty will be reported to the university. Evey student must write his/her own homework/code (unless you are in the same group for the programming project). Showing your code or homework solutions to others is a violation of academic honesty. It is your responsibility to ensure that others cannot access your code or homework solutions. Consulting related textbooks, papers and information available on Internet for your assignment and homework is fine. However, copying a large portion of such information will be considered as academic dishonesty. If you borrow a small piece of any such information, please acknowledge that in your assignment. Please see the following web site for a complete explanation of the Academic Honor Code.

Late Policy and Make-up Exams

Late assignments and paper summaries will not ordinarily be accepted. If, for some compelling reason, you cannot hand in an assignment on time, please contact the TA or instructor as far in advance as possible. Written assignments or project deliverables are due at the beginning of a class, you should hand them in at the beginning of the class;
No credit will be given to late projects and presentations;
No make-up exams (except under extremely unusual circumstances).

Students with Disabilities

Americans With Disabilities Act: Students with disabilities needing academic accommodation should: (1) register with and provide documentation to the Student Disability Resource Center; (2) bring a letter to the instructor indicating the need for accommodation and what type. This syllabus and other class materials are available in alternative format upon request. For more information about services available to FSU students with disabilities, contact the: Student Disability Resource Center: 874 Traditions Way, 108 Student Services Building, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-4167. (850) 644-9566 (voice), (850) 644-8504 (TDD), sdrc@admin.fsu.edu, http://www.disabilitycenter.fsu.edu/.

Grading Policy

The course grade will break down as follows,

Assignment:15%
Paper Presentation:5%
Paper Summary:15%
Project: 30%
Final exam:35%

Any regrading request should be submitted to the instructor or the TA(s) within one week since the graded deliverables are handed out to the students.

Your final grade will be assigned as follows,

A: 100 - 90; A-: 90 - 85;
B+: 85 - 80; B: 80 - 75; B-: 75 - 70;
C: 70 - 60;
F: 60 - 0.

This table indicates minimum guaranteed grades. Under certain limited circumstances (e.g., an unreasonably hard exam), we may select more generous ranges or scale the scores to adjust.

Last updated: Aug. 1st, 2023