NEWS May 31st:

Study guide for the FINAL EXAM now posted.

Assignment #3 was posted May 15th.

May 5th: The website has been brought up-to-date, especially the Syllabus, which is now complete through to the end of the course. Another assignment, #3, will be assigned and posted at some point.

Earlier/old news:

The material on the website is seriously out-of-date. What counts is what I go over in class. I'm preparing the midterm for this Thursday (5/2) and will be going over that material on Monday and Tuesday in preparation for the test.

After that we will go over Chap. 7 briefly and then really focus on Chap. 8 -- Durability, the 'D' in ACID, as well as Chap. 9 which explains how transactions can commit safely and correctly even when they're distributed across multiple resource managers. These important topics will keep us busy for the remainder of the quarter.

April 22nd: Assignment #2 is posted. Follow the Assignments link to the left. Topic is isolation -- schedules and locking. Due as hardcopy at the beginning of class, Monday the 29th.

April 8th: Assignment #1 was posted. Follow the Assignments link to the left. The Syllabus is not yet prepared. For now, you should have thoroughly read Chapters 1 and 2. By the end of this week you should have read Chapter 3 one time through.

To the students in this course:

Transaction processing in database systems is quite an amazing process, when you get right down to it. It assures that even when many transactions are happening simultaneously (or apparently so) that they don't interfere with one another, or worse, interact in an inconsistent way. More interesting still is that database systems that handle transactions properly cannot ever perform an inconsistent or partial transaction, even in the face of machine or network failure or even disk failure. While a database system is running, you can pull the plug on it. When it recovers, all of the transactions that were in progress when the plug was pulled are restored to a state in which the transactions did not occur at all (and must be redone) or they completed successfully and correctly. The classic example is transferring money between two accounts. You would think that if the money was removed from one account and then the plug was pulled before the money could be added to the other, that the result would be wrong -- that money would have disappeared from the first account and never appear in the second. But transaction processing systems are designed so this cannot happen!

Because of the complex nature of transaction processing this course will cover the ideas in detail but will not include programming projects. So your task will be to learn the concepts and terminology and be able to do the problems, quizzes and exams by answering questions using the correct terminology and concepts and drawing the appropriate diagrams when necessary.

The textbook we will use in this course is a basic one by acknowledged experts in the field, Principles of Transaction Processing for the Systems Professional by Philip A. Bernstein (Microsoft) and Eric Newcomer (Iona, Waltham, MA). I will supplement the text with various other material, such as a discussion of the SQL statements that control transactions explicitly and implicitly.

Since we will not have projects, the course will be built around assignments and exams, with the exams by far the most important. Consider the assignments as your way of preparing for the tests. There will be three small quizzes, a Midterm and a Final Exam.

Many of you will be involved with databases in your work in the future. It is far easier to work with databases if you really understand what's going on inside them, rather than just knowing some external "user-level" manipulations. This course will be a big step towards giving you the critical inside knowledge that will help you succeed in various endeavors in the future.

      -- Professor Futrelle