Announcements:

• The presentation schedule and guidelines are now available here.
• "Proof-of-attendance" quiz is available here; it is due Dec. 9, 2006, Saturday, 11:59pm CST.
• An individual progress report needs to be submitted by Nov. 22, 2006. Please see the message about this posted in the newsgroup (dated Nov. 17) for details about this.
• Midterm grades are available. The solution (with grading criteria) is available here. For statistics, return policy, and regrading policy, please check the newsgroup.
• Assignment #1 and #3 grades are available. You can check your grade at Illinois Compass. Instructions on how to get returned homeworks and request a regrading are now available here.
• Solution for Assignment #3 is released.
• Assignment #2 grades are available. You can check your grade at Illinois Compass. The solution for Assignment #2 is available here. Instructions on how to get returned homeworks and request a regrading are now available here.
• A clarification for Assignment #1: There was a request for extending the deadline, because the last paper for DB Benchmarking will not be covered until the due date. However, since you don't need to come up with a SGP for every paper, you can choose to work on other papers. Also, some of SGPs will be used/adapted to the midterm. So we won't be able to extend the deadline. You can feel free to skip this benchmarking paper, but make sure to make 5 SGPs. Or, you can read this benchmarking paper before the corresponding class and come up with a SGP for it.
• Assignment #3 is available here. The due date is 10/6.
• Class Wiki is ready. Please submit your Assignment #1 through here.
• Assignment #2 is available here. The due date is 9/20.
• The class on Sept 22 (Friday) is now re-schedule at 5pm-6:15pm, Sept 26, Tuesday, in the same classroom.
• Please note that you are only required to write a review for the major papers covered before the midterm, and you may miss up to two reviews without incurring a penalty on your grade. We encourage you to write a review for all the papers covered before the midterm except for Graefe's survey on query execution.
• Instructions on how to write and submit a review are now available here. It is also linked to the basic information page under "Format".
• I2CS students should review the I2CS tutorials.

This is a graduate-level database course, aiming to introduce the classic milestones and survey the current trends in database research. The course material will be drawn from original research literature -- both classic and recent papers.

The course format is lecture-based. We will generally cover one paper per class, and students will be expected to read the paper before the class. Participation in class discussions is expected. In the first half of the course, we will selectively review key milestones in the development of relational database systems -- starting from Codd's seminal paper defining the relational model, continuing through several key implementation techniques, and ending with database benchmarking. In the second half, we will survey the major recent trends after the relational databases became mature. We will cover the major current topics in database research, such as data integration, ranking in databases, text databases and information retrieval, Web information management, and data mining.

There will be 3 assignments (to be finished in the first half of the semester) and a midterm exam to ensure that students have a solid udnerstanding of the foundation of the modern relational databases. Students also need to complete (in teams) a course project so that they can have some handson experience with research and/or development in some current topic of data/information management.