Vanderbilt’s CS x265 (Introduction to Database Management Systems) in Spring 2018 is taught by Doug Fisher (see Personnel and Office Hours).
Meeting Times and Places
Class is scheduled Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8:10 am to 9:25 am in FGH 134 (Jacobs Believed in Me Auditorium). If you can’t make it to class, then you can attend by Zoom (Join URL: … during lecture times ONLY). I will record in-class meetings and post them for your later review.
Materials and Logistics
Each class meeting on the schedule is associated with material that you will study in advance of class. The necessary conceptual material is found through watching lectures and doing exercises on Professor Jennifer Widom’s Self-Paced Database mini-courses, offered by Stanford University as an online reference (http://online.stanford.edu/course/databases-self-paced). Additionally, you can read from an optional textbook (A First Course in Database Systems, 3rd edition, by Ullman and Widom, U/W), which you can obtain independently. On some-to-many weeks I will assign other material as well (e.g., papers, other videos), which you will also find on the schedule.
Of all the texts I have ever used, the Widom “multimedia text” (i.e., mini-courses) is the only one that has received (apparently) unanimous and enthusiastic endorsement from students in classes over the last few years.
To use the online and free course material first register as a user, or you can access the same material without registering, by using the “explore course” option. Read guidelines for using the online course.
Most all information regarding the course is found on these my.vanderbilt.edu pages. Brightspace will be used for the gradebook and for submission of assignments, quizzes, and project deliverables. The discussion forum on Brightspace is also available.
Grading
Course grades are computed from scores on several exams, quizzes, assignments, and a group project. These assessments and their weights in computing grades are discussed at Grading.
Workload
Vanderbilt has no stated guideline (that I can find) on the amount you work per credit hour, but other universities state an expectation of an average of 3 hours per credit hour per week. This passes my sanity check (a 20 credit hour semester would have you working 60 hours per week on classes if every class were exactly at “expectation”, and a 15 credit hour semester would have you working about 45 hours per week on classes). For a 3 credit course like CS x265, that is approximately 9 hours of work per week, including class time (or 6.5 hours outside of class per week). You will see my time estimates for various activities on the Schedule, which I’ve used for designing the syllabus. My estimates assume that you work uniformly on class responsibilities (e.g., minimal procrastination on a project deadline), so they may not be a good estimate of how you manage the time (i.e., distribute the load), but I still expect them to be a good estimate of the average load.
Data Diaries
Data diaries are relatively open-ended logs where students place readings, design sketches, evidence of other outside-of-class learning, and other thoughts, observations, and resource pointers. For example, over the course of the semester your data diary might include pointers to articles on cyber-security, with brief comments; similar entries for data mining articles; articles on medical and environmental applications, with your own original design sketches that reverse engineer the relevant databases; weekly progress updates on a prototype implementation of an original mobile app with a database backend; certificates showing completion of online database modules; identification of patterns in personal data on diet, exercise, music; novel and challenging SQL queries; thoughts that are triggered by formal course requirements; and other possibilities.
Data diaries are optional for CS 3265 students.
Graduate Credit
If you are taking the course for graduate credit (CS 5265) then you must submit data diary entries with at least two weekly entries for each week of the course, including exam weeks.
Only share what you don’t mind the instructor, TA, and graders seeing — you will be submitting data diary updates weekly on Brightspace.
See related tabs on Motivation and Honor Code.