CMU 15-445/645 :: Intro to Database Systems (Fall 2024)

Systems programming in depth

This Carnegie Mellon course covers how database management systems are designed and built. It looks at how a database stores and indexes data, how it processes transactions, and how queries get executed.

Topics in the syllabus

• Data models, including relational, document and key-value
• Storage models and storage architectures such as log-structured designs
• Indexes and filters, from order-preserving trees to vector indexes
• Transactions, concurrency control and recovery
• Query processing, joins, sorting and optimization
• Parallel architectures, from multi-core to distributed systems

Who should attend

The course is described as suited to students prepared to work hard on their systems programming. Case studies of open-source and commercial database systems tie the techniques to real trade-offs.