Advanced databases
Graduate · CS / Programming
Syllabus focus
Standard syllabus · STEM / applied
Pricing
Graduate-level rates are set on consultation. See the pricing page for K–12 and undergraduate rates.
Topics typically covered
Standard syllabus
Query processing
- Relational algebra equivalence and optimization
- Cost-based optimization and statistics
- Join algorithms: nested loop, hash join, sort-merge
- Indexing strategies beyond B-trees
- Parallel query execution
Transactions and recovery
- Serializability and conflict/view definitions
- Two-phase locking and timestamp ordering
- MVCC in commercial systems
- ARIES recovery algorithm (intro)
- Distributed transactions and 2PC (intro)
STEM / applied
Modern data platforms
- Column stores and vectorized execution
- NewSQL and distributed SQL systems
- Stream processing engines
- Data lakes, lakehouses, and catalog layers
- Graph databases and query languages (survey)
Research and tuning
- Workload replay and index tuning advisors
- Approximate query processing (intro)
- Differential privacy in analytics (intro)
- Paper presentations from SIGMOD/VLDB
- Project: optimize queries on a real engine
Notes
Graduate follow-on to undergrad databases; may include substantial implementation project.