Email mthomas@cs.csustan.edu  Put "CS4250" in the subject line of the email.

Up to date office hour information is on Dr. Thomas's web page.

Do not use "Assignment Comments" in Canvas to communicate with me. I will see those comments only while or after I grade the assignment in question... and, in some cases, I will never see them at all. Email or visit office hours.

The required text for the class is: Databases Illuminated, 3rd ed by C. Ricardo and S.D. Urban. ('Navigate 2 Advantage Access' offered by publishers is not necessary.)

Alternative book, also ok: Databases Illuminated, 4th ed by C. Ricardo and S.D. Urban.

Your primary responsibility is to be an active, engaged, prepared participant in the course. There will be quite a bit of reading which will require your consistent attention. Learning and understanding are active, not passive processes. You will have to take responsibility for your own learning, and you will be expected to contribute to other's learning also. Part of your learning will involve expressing yourself, in writing and verbally.

Other specific requirements:

• You will be expected to read most of the readings before the lecture that covers that topics. The instructor may give pop quizzes on the readings.
• There will be an in-class midterm, two quizzes, and a final, covering the primary material of the course.
• There will be homework exercises.
• There will be significant project assignments, requiring full participation in group work outside of class time. We will discuss this in more detail in class.
  

The final grade weighting of student work is estimated in the table below.  The final weights should be close to those in the table, but circumstances may arise during the semester that force reweighting.  (For example, if one of the exams proves unusually difficult, the instructor may reduce the weight of that exam and weight the other exam higher.)

There are three major components to student grades in this class: 1) exams, 2) individual assignments, and 3) assignments completed as a group. If a student does not demonstrate a minimal level of competence in each and all of the three components, this is grounds for assigning an F or NC in the class.

Strong evidence from multiple sources that a student did not participate significantly in multiple parts of the group project is grounds to assign zero out up to 20% of the entire Assignments portion of that student's grade.

Mini-Quizzes, 2 Quizzes, Midterm, Final Exam	5, 7, 7, 15, 16%
Homeworks and Programming Assignments	45%
Class participation, pop quizzes, extra credit, etc	5%
	100%

A plus and minus grading scale will be used for final grades.

University deadlines for setting grading options, and deadlines for enrolling, withdrawing, etc.

The work you do for this course will be your own. You are not to submit other people's (or any machine's or AI's) work and represent it as your own.

Students who violate this policy will receive no credit on the assignment, may receive an "F" in the course (at the instructor's discretion), and a report will be sent to the university Office of Student Affairs.

Each student gets an automatic extension of 4 calendar days. You can use the extension on any programming or homework assignment(s) during the semester (in increments that are rounded up to the nearest integer). For instance, you can hand in one assignment 4 days late, or each of four assignments 1 day late. When you hand in a late assignment, you must identify in the README file the following: (i) how late this assignment is, and (ii) how many of the total Late Days you have left. No assignment will be accepted more then 4 days late. After you have used up your Late Days, any assignment handed in late will be marked off 25% per day. There will be no extensions granted.

If a group uses a Late Day on a project part, that will "cost" each member of the group one individual Late Day.

Course Learning Outcomes:

Students should be able to:

1. Write SQL queries, including queries with more advanced features like group by, subqueries, and so on.
2. Design a small database and draw a diagram for the database in some common data model, such as the entity-relationship (ER) model
3. Translate a simple database design into the relational model, create the database in a relational DBMS, load the database with data and run queries against it
4. Illustrate understanding of classic algorithms for concurrency, ARIES recovery and query optimization in relaional DBMS by, for example, being able to:
   • Identify or create query schedules that are conflict serializable, or that follow the two phase locking protocol (can allow concurrent queries, safely)
   • Create data structures used in the ARIES recovery algorithm, to match a simple DBMS log supplied by the instructor
   • Draw query plans for queries, and explain (in English) alternate plans a cost-based query optimization engine would consider and why those alternate plans would be considered
5. Improve abilities to work in a group on a project, demonstrated by working in a group on a project

This course can be used to satisfy one "elective" or one "practice" graduation requirement for a computer science major.

This is a face-to-face class.

Warning: I reserve the right to make changes to the syllabus at any time during the term by announcing them in class and on the course web page.

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