COMP3311: Database Systems

- Weekly quizzes (from Weeks 2 to 10 - 8 quizzes): 10%
- 2 x assignments (20% each)
- Final exam (50%; hurdle is that students must score at least 45% in the final exam to pass).

COMP2521 or COMP1927 are the pre-requisites. It is worth noting that many students who have done INFS1603 would have seen a lot of the first half of the course before and students who have done COMP1531 would have been exposed to the ER models that were taught in the first two weeks. In saying that, COMP3311 / 9311 covers these topics again and in greater depth.

I have quite mixed opinions about this course. While the course serves as a good introductory course to database system management, I felt like I didn't really learn much from the course and it left a great deal to be desired. Coming into the course, I was expecting to build a database from scratch (or at least build off of a pre-existing database). Rather the assessments were just reading off a database (which isn't a bad idea for an assessment) but the focus shifted more to using Python / Postgres / PlpgSQL to read queries. As a result, I'm still unsure of how to construct a database schema and how you would properly manage the database. This is important because COMP3311 / 9311 might be the only database course a Computer Science student would take and leaving them without the skills of developing a database can be a detriment.

The first assessment was really fun and I thoroughly enjoyed building SQL queries. The second assessment felt a bit unnecessary. To this day, I don't see what the point of building an assessment around "degrees of separation", particularly in a database course. It seemed to be more fitting to a course akin to COMP2521 where algorithms and data structures are the focus of the course. The first two tasks were fine, but the last task was lengthy, dry, and somewhat irrelevant.

The lectures were basically taught by jas and I enjoyed his antics. The lectures were interesting, although a bit slow at times, and the QnA sessions were really interesting to attend. The quizzes were fairly easy and, with enough revision, you can blitz through them in about 10 minutes.

An overall okay course; if the assessments aligned with the core of the course, then it would be a lot more interesting to do them and the reward of completing them would far exceed the painstakingly long hours of debugging SQL queries.
An update: the final exam experienced soured my taste for the course. It is deserving of a 1.5/5. The theory side of the exam was actually alright and was quite fun, so the rest of the rant is solely based on the practical part of the exam. But holy fuck. The exam was so poorly written. The exam was cluttered with ambiguous specifications and when we asked for further clarifications, we were asked to refer to the specifications. To put it bluntly, no one who I talked to understood what was asked. And when we did, we didn't know whether what we were writing was evenly vaguely correct. This was caused by the lack of autotests or sample outputs - each question only had one partial output that doesn't address any of the ambiguity that the questions provided. It was possibly the worst exam I've taken to date and if it's completely automarked, there's going to be a barrage of complaints from the students.

- Lecture hours vary each week depending on the length of the pre-recorded video (approx. 2 hours of lecture material were taught).
- 1 x 2 hour live QnA session
- 1 x 2 hour lab (weeks 1 - 5)
- 1 x 1 hour tutorial (weeks 7 - 10)

2/5.

Lectures are pre-recorded and available 2 weeks before.

- Lecturer: Raymond Wong.
- Lab instructor: Nanway Chen.
- Tutor: Yi Zhuang.

Lecture slides are sufficient.

3/51.5/5.

None prescribed.
Recommended:

• Fundamentals of Database Systems (Elmasri and Navathe, 7th edition, 2016, Addison-Wesley)
• Database System Concepts (Silberschatz, Korth, Sudarshan, 6th edition, 2010, McGraw-Hill)
• Database Systems: The Complete Book (Garcia-Molina, Ullman, Widom, 2nd edition, 2008, Prentice-Hall)
• Database Systems: An Application-Oriented Approach (Kifer, Berstein, Lewis, 2nd edition (Complete Version), 2006, Addison-Wesley)

I used the first textbook and found it really useful. It was a bit verbose at times but they offer complementary slides for revision.

2021 Term 1

71 (CR).