CS 542 - Course Project Information

General Guidelines

This course includes a class project. The intent is for students to select from a wide spectrum of possible projects depending on your interests and skills. You should preferably work in groups of two or three. In order to find team-mates for your project, you are free to prepare a brief 1 minute presentation on your proposed project to tell the other students in class. Or, advertise your project idea to cs542@cs mailing group.

Project Types

Some of the general directions/projects acceptable for the course are:

• The design, implementation and evaluation of a database management application for a customer, e.g., some organization on campus or even a real company that you identify. Such a system must be fully functional and meet the client's requirements in order to receive a good grade.

• A software development of a particular subcomponent or software tool of a DBMS system. This would be a solid (re-)implementation of some existing database software. For example, you could build a basic SQL query processor, buffer manager, concurrency control policy, index support, XML-to-relational data manager, etc. This could be done from scratch, or using some of the available DBMS "teaching" software as starting point, such as SimpleDB from Boston University, Minibase from textbook authors, etc.

• The design, implementation and testing of a benchmark program. For example, this could be the development of a set of tools, such as buffer manager, disk layout, reporting tools, to make the evaluation of different access structures easier. Another example would be to install and work with several commercial database engines such as Oracle11g and IBM DB2 to benchmark their functionalities as well as performance of XML management.

• A research project on some aspect of database systems that proposes a new idea. For example, you may investigate data management for wikis, remote connection databases, distributed database support for gaming, sensor database tools, RSS feed query monitor, online stream processing system, medical data monitoring, XML data integration, spatio-temporal object tracking queries, or data mining algorithms. You will need to validate your ideas -- typically by running some application examples, or performing some analysis of the proposed algorithm, or by conducting a performance study.

Project Stages and Deliverables.

The project has four stages:

• Project Intent

  Each group will turn in a typed project direction (one or two pages) defining the project. This proposal should clearly explain the proposed work to be done, indicating the nature of the project (theoretical, system building, simulation study, experimental evaluation, or application) as well as listing the tasks to be undertaken and the deliverables for the end of the course.

  Note: Please discuss your ideas on a project with the instructor before submitting your proposal. Your proposal will be approved, disapproved or some modifications of direction will be suggested, but you will not receive a grade for it.

• Project Proposal

  Each group will turn in a typed proposal (about 5 pages) now defining the finalized project based on both feedback from the instructor as well as having dug into the environment to fully understand the feasibility as well as the literature background. This proposal should clearly explain the proposed work to be done, and also list the relevant environmental setup (tools) you are now familiar with in order to succeed to complete the project. Do provide a clear plan for completion, including a list of tasks to be undertaken week by week, and the deliverables for the end of the course.

  Note: This will count for 10% of your project score (focus is on clarity of project definition, a well defined scope of the project, and preliminary feasibility assessment).

• Progress Report

  The progress report ( and possibly with an associated in-class presentation) should clearly state the current status of the project. By this time, I would expect you to have conducted all necessary background work including establishing a bibliography, reading relevant papers, completed setup of the development tools and environment, and resolving any design issues of your proposed system. If an implementation project, I would like to see some initial subset of your proposed functionality functioning. You also should have refined the project plan, and if there are any re-directions in your effort based on your background studies, please indicate so. Make sure to include literature you have reviewed for the project and to list all other tasks you have accomplished thus far. {\bf In your accomplished task list, you must indicate the division of labor, i.e., which member of your team has taken care of which task. If one person took the initiative and drafted the DB schema, and then a second person in your team refined it further, indicate so as well. All team members must sign the document, which is to signify that you as a team have discussed your progress, and your satisfaction or dis-satisfaction with the amount of effort that everyone has put in so far. You need to construct a precise schedule, by week, on how you plan to make progress. Note that the schedule is meant to help you plan your work. The reports must be typed and typically is about 8 to 10 pages.

  Note: This deliverable will carry 30% of your project score. You must demonstrate that you have completed a sufficient amount of effort (at least 50% or more) and convince the instructor that there is a clear plan of what steps you are taking to assure successful completion of the project. The progress made on the project will be assessed based on the report, and a demonstration in front of the instructor of your preliminary code, if any.

• Final Project Presentation and Report

  This final project presentation will be done in class in the form of a software demonstration. See below for what aspects should be stressed in this presentation. The final project report should be a well-written technical report describing your project (and put onto the course webpage). It is likely that this report will include parts of your progress report (please turn the graded progress report back in with your final report). Depending on the nature of your project, it will need to contain experimental charts, sample runs, a detailed analysis of the results, a system design, a justification and evaluation of selected tools, etc. The report is expected to be around 15 to 20 pages.

  Note: This part of the course project will be graded as the remaining 60% of the project grade.

Final Project Grading

The final grade of the team project (which may not necessarily be the same for each member of the team) will consist of:

• the difficulty of the project you have chosen to work on, and your solution approach,
• the oral project presentation (covering the problem your group tackled, your solution approach, and your results at the end of the course),
• the written documentation of your project in the form of a report (which you will have to enter on the Web to make it accessible to other students in the class),
• the demonstration of your system (including successful example runs), only if applicable and
• the understanding of each team member of his or her part of the project, as well as of the overall group product.