Teaching Assistants and TA Office Hours

TA office hours will be held Mon-Fri 6pm-8pm on Zoom (except for holidays).
No appointment is necessary.

Aditya Bhanwadiya		Nikhileshwar Bommareddy		Pushyanth Damarapati		Bradford Derby		Alexandra Descoteaux
Vinesh Gande		Jingyi Gong		Ajay Inavolu		Sunny Kang		Vamshika Lekkala
Ruchi Nitsure		Micah Pacis		Samved Shah		Katrina Shonka		Dachuan Zhang

Course Information

Course Description

This course presents how to design a relational database from requirements gathering, to conceptual and logical modeling. We also cover how to query databases using SQL, the ACID properties of a relational database management system, and fundamentals of database programming using triggers, stored procedures, functions, and events. Advanced topics include indexing, transactions, concurrency and recovery. The course will also provide an introduction to non-relational (NoSQL) databases. Students will carry out an individual data integration and analysis project. Upon completion of the course, students will be able to:

• Design, implement, and query a relational database
• Write complex SQL queries, SQL functions, SQL triggers and SQL procedures
• Connect a computer application to a commercial relational database (MySQL) and access and manipulate data from the database within the application
• Act as database administer to a MySQL server
• Describe ACID properties and the inner workings of transactions
• Describe the strengths and the weaknesses of both the SQL and NoSQL DBMS

Class Participation and Class Recordings

This is an online but synchronous course with live lectures. Therefore, I generally no longer record my lectures. Your attendance at each lecture is expected and on some days required. I strongly recommend that you come to every live session with your cameras on and your microphone muted. In the event you need to miss a class, I will be posting lecture notes and coding examples that evening. (Materials should be available by 8pm.)

I may record portions of some lectures, particularly when I am demonstrating the technical capabilities of a database system. The purpose of these recordings is to enable you to go back over critical material that you may have missed in class or where it might have been challenging to follow along.

I very much welcome active background discussion in my classrooms. To ask a question, feel free to virtually raise your hand or post your question on chat. And if you know the answer, go ahead and respond!

Recommended Reading

Additional recommended readings may be assigned from books that are freely available to you through O'Reilly E-Books.

Homework and Late Policy

There will be about five assignments and a database capstone project due at the end of the semester. The detailed dates are listed on the schedule below. Homework will be submitted on GradeScope. Homework cannot be accepted by email. My late policy is very straight-forward: Homeworks submitted 1-48 hours late receive a 10% penalty. No homeworks will be accepted more than 48 hours late. Please understand that with a class this size, maintaining a strict schedule for homework submissions and grading is paramount.

Academic Integrity (Please Read!)

Database design and formulating SQL queries is a creative process. Individuals must reach their own understanding of problems and discover paths to their solutions. Verbal discussions with fellow students is fine, but I expect each student to do their own work unless I explicitely allow for group assignments. If you share code, files, queries, or if you provide or receive help on a quiz, you are breaking the rules. Do not, under any circumstances, share code, queries, or designs with your fellow students. This is a direct violation of the course collaboration policy. Please be aware that I take the issue of academic integrity very seriously. The consequences of cheating in my class are at my discretion and may include receiving a zero for the assignment or quiz, a full letter grade reduction in your final grade, or failing the course altogether. Please contact me if you have any questions about acceptable conduct. And if you are stuck on an assignment, the TAs and I are here to help, or you can pose your question on Piazza. The university's academic integrity policy discusses actions regarded as violations and consequences for students: http://www.northeastern.edu/osccr/academic-integrity

Evaluation

The final grade for this course will be weighted as follows:

• Homework: 85%
• Optional Database Capstone Project (2-4 students per group): Extra Credit TBD
• Take-home open-book quizzes: 15%

The homework and project will be weighted individually to optimize your grade. (If your homework average is better than your project grade, I'll give more weight to homework, for example.) Final grades will be assigned based on the following scale. In computing your final letter grade, I round your numerical grade to the nearest integer. (A 92.5 or higher is an A.)

Letter	Range
A	93 - 100
A-	90 - 92
B+	87 - 89
B	83 - 86
B-	80 - 82
C+	77 - 79
C	73 - 76
C-	70 - 72
D+	67 - 69
D	63 - 66
D-	60 - 62
F	<60