Date Posted: 7/12/2021

Immanuel Trummer, Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, uploaded his twenty-five hour “Database Systems” course to YouTube; it has now surpassed a quarter-million views.

The lectures emerged from Trummer's Fall 2020 online course given at Cornell University. Here is a link to the first seventeen hours of the course; the eight-hour second part is also available. In addition to the complete video content, all of the course slides are also available for download.

Roughly the first two-thirds of the course is based on the textbook Database Management Systems by Raghu Ramakrishnan and Johannes Gehrke. The final third of the course discusses recently proposed systems, with more details about them found in corresponding research papers.

As Trummer puts it, in this course, one can “learn about relational and non-relational database management systems.” The course objectives include learning how to query database systems via languages such as SQL (the structured query language). This involves seeing how database systems work internally; how they store and index data; how they process and optimize queries; and how they process transactions while providing guarantees such as isolation, atomicity, and durability (ACID guarantees).

Furthermore, the course addresses questions of database design and Trummer discusses novel approaches to data management via NoSQL or NewSQL systems. Finally, Trummer addresses graph, stream, and spatial data, and systems that are specialized for those data types.

In related coverage, see this faculty profile: "At Work on Making Database Systems More Efficient and More User-Friendly."