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California State University Stanislaus

CS 4250: Database Management Systems

Spring 2026

3:00 - 3:50 pm, M W F, DBH 165. Dr. Megan Thomas

[Syllabus ]        [Announcements]        [Calendar/Lecture Notes]        [Homeworks]        [Resources]        [Fun News]

Welcome to CS4250, an introduction to database management systems. Topics include:

Modeling, development, and implementation of database systems using storage structures, data definition languages, and data manipulation languages for the relational approach to database management. Database integrity and security problems. Historical development of database systems. 3 units. (Academic Catalog description.)

Prerequisite: CS 3100.

Announcements and Upcoming Events

6 March 2026	O.C. caught a syntax error in today's slides. The corrected information is "CREATE VIEW viewname [(viewcolname,viewcolname...)] AS..." (A ] has been removed.) For more information, see IBM's View Columns documentation for Informix.
4 March 2026	"Top 10 Highest-Paid Tech Jobs in 2026", 2026 Jan 21, TechRepublic.com
2 Mar 2026	For our in-class exercise work this week: Schema: Earthquake (qname, qdate, latitude, longitude, magnitude, fault) Damage(cityID, qname, cost, liveslost) Cities(cID, cname, latitude, longitude, population) [city names may not be unique] Questions (in SQL, and relational algebra where possible): Find the names and dates of earthquakes whose magnitude was greater than 7.0. Find the average population of all the cities whose names start with "San". List the lives lost, quake names and city names for all quakes that occurred before 1960. List the city identifiers and total cost, per city, of all quakes with magnitude greater than 7.0. List the average magnitude of quakes for each fault (grouped by fault). List all earthquakes and, where applicable, also list city IDs and lives lost in that city for quakes that affected cities. List the names of cities whose populations are greater than the average city population.
27 Feb 2026	One student wrote: "What is the max number of columns allowed in a table?" as their sample exam question. This question will not be on the exam, because I suspect the answer is dependent on which DBMS software you are using. But it is a good question. For example, Microsoft's SQL Server has a limit of 1,024 columns per table (30,000 columns if the table is using "sparse column sets"). Here is Microsoft's "Maximum capacity specifications for SQL Server" page.
27 Feb 2026	Sample tables for classroom exercises: CREATE TABLE Books(title char(40), lastname CHAR(40), firstname CHAR(40), pubyear INTEGER, bookID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY) CREATE TABLE AwardWinners (bookID INTEGER, year INTEGER, award CHAR(60), authorage INTEGER, PRIMARY KEY (bookID, award, year)) CREATE TABLE Awards (awardname char(60), primary key (awardname)) (Note that, to fit on a PPT slide, foreign key key declarations were left out)
20 February 2026	More job market news: "Employers Project Salary Increases for Most New Graduates", insidehighered.com, 19 Feb 2026
18 February 2026	"These are the fastest-growing skills companies are hiring for, according to new report", cnbc.com, February 9, 2026. Top tech jobs 2026: 5 of the fastest-growing tech, AI careers", mashable.com, February 7, 2026.
30 January 2026	Per today's discussion: Tim Berners-Lee's Wikipedia page -- designed and build world's first web browser, website... started the whole WWW shebang. Also, Google reports that the 2026 Winter Olympics start in Italy on February 6, 2026.
28 January 2026	Welcome to CS 4250!

Homeworks

Project Overview

	Points
Project Part 1	20
Project Part 2	25 + 6
Homework 1	30
Project Part 3	20
Homework 2	15

Books at the CSU Stanislaus Library

• Database Systems: The Complete Book by Garcia-Molina, Ullman and Widom, three extremely well-respected database researchers and professors at Stanford University.
• Database Management Systems by Raghu Ramakrishnan and Johannes Gherke, excellent, systems-oriented introduction to the field of database management.
• Database Tuning by Dennis Sasha and Philippe Bonet. A clear presentation of how database design decisions impact database performance. Also discusses IBM, Oracle and Microsoft systems and how design choices can impact them.
• Readings in Database Systems by M. Stonebraker. A collection of influential papers in DBMS research history.
• Computer Science & Information Systems from the CSU Stanislaus Library -- easiest link to reach the Safari TechBooks collection, where many books about SQL, etc, can be found. (You'll need your CSU Stanislaus student credentials to log in.)

The Ramakrishnan and Garcia-Molina/Ullman/Widom textbooks are both available at the university library.

DBMS Resources

• IBM's DB2, etc
• MySQL
• Oracle
• PostgreSQL
• Microsoft SQL Server
• SQLite
  • 'cd' (Unix/Mac) or 'chdir' (Windows/ Command Prompt) your command line window into whatever folder you put the files you downloaded and unzipped, and type ./sqlite3 (Unix/Mac) or .\sqlite3 (Windows) and the SQLite command line tool should start up.
  • I've put the start-up file of SQL commands here. I usually copy-and-paste the ch5-demo.sql file's contents into the sqlite3 command prompt. (There is an import command, but it has occasionally behaved oddly for me.)
  • Basic instructions for the command line SQLite are here.
• SQLFiddle.com -- a web site that allows uers to "fiddle around" with SQL.
• JDBC Tutorial, courtesy Jeff Ullman
• JDBC Tutorial, courtesy Oracle
• MySQL Tutorial - pure tutorial web site
• Phlonx's Third Normal Form Tutorial, with numerous illustrative diagrams
• XKCD on SQL
• "Hard drive teardown", EngineerGuy video
• Podcast: "Where the Internet Lives", 2020-2021. A Google-centric view into the insides of data centers, and interviews with assorted people who work at them. May give you insights into possible future careers.
• "Episode 485: Howard Chu on B+tree Data Structure in Depth", from the Software Engineering Radio podcast -- a one hour introduction to the most popular data structure in database systems
• For more information on ...
  • ... the ARIES recovery algorithm, the paper to read is "ARIES: a transaction recovery method supporting fine-granularity locking and partial rollbacks using write-ahead logging", which someone already put online on the Stanford web site.
    C. Mohan, Don Haderle, Bruce Lindsay, Hamid Pirahesh, and Peter Schwarz. 1992. ARIES: a transaction recovery method supporting fine-granularity locking and partial rollbacks using write-ahead logging. ACM Trans. Database Syst. 17, 1 (March 1992), 94-162. https://doi.org/10.1145/128765.128770
  • ... "optimistic locking techniques vs strict two-phase locking", the paper to read is "Concurrency control performance modeling: alternatives and implications", which someone put online on the UCBerkeley web site.
    Rakesh Agrawal, Michael J. Carey, and Miron Livny. 1987. Concurrency control performance modeling: alternatives and implications. ACM Trans. Database Syst. 12, 4 (Dec. 1987), 609-654. https://doi.org/10.1145/32204.32220
  • I know of a nice introduction to ARIES written by Mike Franklin but, tragically, it was published in a book that we have no access to.

Fun News Articles and Podcasts

• "11 Oddball Technology Records You Probably Didn't Know", IEEE Spectrum, 02 Oct 2025. (You probably need to be on campus to view this article; it may be paywalled.)
• "TIME's Kid of the Year Is Protecting Seniors From Cybercrime", Time magazine, 9 Sept 2025
• "To counter AI cheating, companies bring back in-person job interviews", ComputerWorld.com, 26 Aug 2025
• "The 7 hottest jobs in IT", cio.com, 3 June 2025
• "Ten Year IT Job Outlook: Positive News for Cybersecurity, Software Development, and Management Roles", Peter Tsai, spiceworks.com, 13 Jan 2025
• "Tech Unemployment Dipped at the End of 2024" from Dice.com (16 Jan 2025).
• "10 most in-demand enterprise IT skills" from CIO.com (10 Dec 2024). Notice that two of the "most in-demand skills" are closely tied to knowledge of DBMSs -- Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server.
• "Engineering the First Fitbit: The Inside Story. They had a billion-dollar idea - and a lot to learn about hardware", IEEE Spectrum, September 2024. A good read if you want to be in a start-up or work with consumer devices someday. (May only be accessible from on campus, or on the campus VPN.)
• Podcast episode: "Episode 454: Thomas Richter on Postgres as an OLAP database" (IEEE Software Engineering Radio, 8 Apr 2021). Listen to this towards the end of a semester, when you will know more of the DBMS vocabulary.
• "Under the Hood at Google and Facebook: A peek at the data centers, servers, and software that keep us feeling connected" IEEE Spectrum, June 2011.
• Database Normalization for the Real World: nice article walking one through the steps of database normalization, with larger- than- can- fit- on- a- PowerPoint- slide relation examples.

Interesting Databases

• FishSounds, a global collection of... (recordings of) fish sounds.
• Global Mammal Parasite Database. From their site: "...a compilation of parasites and pathogens from wild primate, carnivore, and ungulate hosts, obtained from the published scientific literature..."
• Internet Archive, including the Wayback Machine, which lets you travel through the history of the WWW
• Radiooooo - the sounds of radio down the decades
• Sloan Digital Sky Survey Database
• VesselFinder - want to know where a ship is?
• Our World in Data. Data about "the world's largest problems" -- poverty, life expectancy, carbon dioxide emissions...