Course Description

Content

CS633 is an advanced database topics course. This year it will cover two areas.

• The first two-thirds of the course will cover material from the assigned text [AVH95]: classical database theory (Parts B and C of the text), and theory of query languages (selections from parts D and E). We may supplement this with some newer material from the Web.
• The remainder of the course will be a thorough treatment of materialized views, algorithms for incremental view maintenance, etc. My primary source for this will be the edited collection [GM99]. However, much of this material is available on the Web, and I shall try to arrange things so it is not essential for you to buy two textbooks.

Grading

There will be about 8 to 10 fairly substantial problem sets, which I will take seriously. There will be no exams.

Texts and References

• [AHV95] Abiteboul, S., R. Hull and V. Vianu. Foundations of Databases. Addison-Wesley, 1995. Available from Amazon and Powell. This is the “assigned” text. A copy will be placed on reserve in the Engineering Library.
• [AD93]Atzeni, P. and V. DeAntonellis. Relational Database Theory. Benjamin-Cummings, 1993. Available from Amazon. Contains a somewhat less formal treatment of much of the material in [AHV95]. A copy will be placed on reserve in the Engineering Library.
• [L04] Libkin, L. Elements of Finite Model Theory. Springer-Verlag, 2004. Available from Amazon and Powell. A good source for material on logic in the early part of the course.
• [I99] Immerman, N. Descriptive Complexity. Springer-Verlag, 1999. Available from Amazon and Powell. Another good source for material on logic in the early part of the course. Walker likes this book; I think I slightly prefer [L04].
• [GM99] Gupta, A. and I. Mumick. Materialized Views: Techniques, Implementations and Applications. Available from Amazon and Powell. This is the subject of the last third of the course.