| Course Staff | Instructor: Remy Wang TA: Zheng Luo, Sai Achalla |
| Time & Location | M/W 4:00-5:30pm @ MS 4000A |
| Office Hours | After class & by appointment |
Discussion board We use Ed for discussion and online Q&A, please sign up using your UCLA email here.
Grading 100% of your grade will be based on 5-6 quizzes throughout the quarter. This is perhaps unusual, so let me explain the rationale.
Philosophy I believe the main goal of a class is to help you learn. There is ample evidence that cramming for exams does not contribute to learning, and only stresses you out – I myself never liked exams and never learned anything from them. There is also a lot of evidence that hands-on practice is the best way to learn, so there will be homework assignments, but they are not graded. Why? Before AI, I would teach a class and base the grades only on homeworks and projects. But as far as I know, there is no reliable way to enforce any AI use policy for assignments. So to motivate you to actually do the homework yourself, I will design the quizzes so that they become very easy if you have done your homework. There will be roughly one quiz per topic as listed below.
| Date | Topic (tentative) | Homework |
|---|---|---|
| 4/13 | SQL | hw1 (WIP) |
| 4/22 | Dependencies | |
| 5/4 | Transactions | |
| 5/13 | Query exection | |
| 5/27 | Indexes | |
| 6/8 | Advanced Topics |
AI Use Of course you are not allowed to use AI during the quizzes. Should you use AI when doing homework? The short answer is no. The slightly longer answer is: you should only use AI to do something, if you don’t want to learn how to do that thing. Think of homework as resistance training – you only learn when you struggle, get confused, and make mistakes. Or, think of it as finding your way through a jungle, and if you always rely on the GPS, you will be hopelessly lost as soon as your phone dies. Still, sometimes you just want to look up a piece of syntax that’s not worth remembering, and using the AI for that does save you time. In that case it’s fine to use AI, because you don’t actually care to memorize the syntax. To help you out, I will clearly note in the assignments when AI use is OK (or even encouraged). When in doubt, post your question on Ed first before asking ChatGPT.
Textbook None. You may use Database System Concepts or Database Systems: The Complete Book as references.