CS4432. Database Systems II

Required Textbook / Readings

The course book below will be closely followed in class, and hence you are strongly encouraged to purchase the book. You are expected to regularly read ahead in this book in preparation for each class session. Many useful references are given in that book.

Database Systems: The Complete Book
Hector Garcia-Molina, Jeffrey D. Ullman and Jennifer D. Widom
Pearson - Prentice Hall.
ISBN: 0-13-187325-4 (2nd edition)
URL: The Prentice-Hall Web Page.

Useful material related to this book can be found at the open access Author Website. In particular, it includes Power Point slides, teaching notes, assignments, projects, Oracle Programming Guidelines, and solutions to selected exercises, for your perusal.

As you may already know, this book has also been used for the first course in databases at WPI. That is, roughly the first 10 chapters of this book are covered by CS3431, while the next 10 chapters are covered by CS4432. There are also broken-down versions of this text book focussing only on the first part and/or the second part of the material in isolation as noted below. However, buying the combined book will be cheaper than buying the 2 books separately.

Lastly, there are other excellent database textbooks available, which cover the syllabus for this course, and you may thus also find them useful for your reference. Some sampling of such books are listed below.

  • Database Management Systems, by Raghu Ramakrishnan and Johannes Gehrke, McGraw-Hill.
  • Fundamentals of Database Systems, by Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe, Addison Wesley.

Also, as second book for this course, and in particular in support of the project we'll undertake as part of this course, we suggest that you may want to look at the text below as well.

This textbook has a software system called "simpledb" as compagnion, and we will be using this system for some of our projects in this course. Since treatment of the internals of this particular database system is provided in the textbook, along with some code snippets, you may find this book useful.