Database System Concepts
        Fourth Edition

              Abraham Silberschatz
              Henry F. Korth
              S. Sudarshan

Suggested Syllabus for a One Semester Systems Oriented Course

The following syllabus is designed for a course where the goal is to teach students the fundamental concepts underlying database system design, including not only the design of applications using databases, but also covering the fundamental implementation techniques used in database systems. The amount of material that needs to be covered will make such a course a rather intensive one to cover in one semester, and students must be prepared for the course load.

• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Entity-Relationship Model
  Although we recommend covering the entire chapter, Sections 2.7 (Extended E-R Features) and 2.8 (Design of an E-R Database Schema), and the corresponding subsections of Section 2.9 (Reduction of an E-R Schema to Tables}, and 2.10 (UML) may be omitted if the time available is short.
• Chapter 3: Relational Model
  Section 3.7 (Domain Relational Calculus) may be omitted if desired.
• Chapter 4: SQL
• Chapter 6: Integrity and Security
• Chapter 7: Relational Database Design
• Chapters 8, 9, 10: Object Oriented Databases, Object Relational Databases and XML
  These chapters may be omitted, but some sections can be used as self-study material.
• Chapter 11: Storage and File Structure
  Section 11.9 (Storage Structures for Object-Oriented Databases) should be omitted.
• Chapter 12: Indexing and Hashing
• Chapter 13: Query Processing
  Sections 13.6 (Other Operations) and 13.9 (Evaluation of Expressions) may be omitted.
• Chapter 14: Query Optimization
  Section 14.4 (Choice of Evaluation Plans) and 14.5 (Materialized Views) may be omitted.
• Chapter 15: Transactions
  Section 15.9 (Testing for Serializability) may be omitted.
• Chapter 16: Concurrency Control
  Section 16.3 (Validation-Based Protocols), Section 16.6.1 (Deadlock Prevention), Section 16.8 (Weak Levels of Consistency) and Section 16.9 (Concurrency in Index Structures) may be omitted.
• Chapter 17: Recovery System
  Sections from 17.5 (Shadow Paging) onwards may be dropped. However, we recommend covering Section 17.6 if time permits.
• Assignments/Project
  The course should be supplemented by assignments and a project. The assignments can involve the design of a schema for a realistic application, and coding and executing SQL queries on a relational database system.

  The project could involve implementing one or more component(s) or a database system, as an index structure, or lock manager, or relation manager (providing an iterator interface), or a simple relational algebra evaluation engine.

Last updated July 6, 2001.