| Course Staff | Remy Wang (Instructor), Zifan He (TA), Vincent Lin (TA) |
| Time & Location | Tue/Thu 4pm-5:50pm @ Haines Hall A2 |
| Office Hours | by appointment |
| 2025-04-01 | Introduction & Basic SQL | keynote | |
| 2025-04-03 | Decomposition and Joins | keynote |
The database sits at the heart of modern software systems of any scale, from smartphone applications to geo-distributed data centers. The SQL language for querying databases has also been ranked as the top-1 programming language by job market demand. Even for non-engineers, knowing how to organize, maintain, and process data has become an essential skill in any discipline. This course covers the fundamentals of database management systems. The students will learn the following key concepts:
Grading: 50% final exam, 50% quizzes. There is a quiz for nearly every lecture. However, everyone automatically gets 5 free quizzes; in other words, we will take your top (N-5) best scores, where N is the total number of quizzes. If you have to miss class but really like quizzes, you can ask me at least 24h before lecture and I’ll let you take the quiz in the morning before lecture. There are homeworks nearly every week, but they make up 0% of your grade. Their only purpose is to help you learn. If you put in full effort into the homeworks, you will find the quizzes and the exam to be easy.
Prerequisites: You must be able to install SQLite on your computer without any help. You must be able to write and run Python programs in the terminal without any help. Alternatively, you must be able to find patient friends who can help you with the above, because the course staff will not offer similar help.
Discussion board: We use ed for discussion and online Q&A, please sign up using your UCLA email here.
Textbook: None. You may use Database System Concepts or Database Systems: The Complete Book as references.