CS 7270: Advanced Database Systems (Fall 2025)
(Seminar in Database Management)

Topics and Agenda

This schedule will be updated regularly as the course progresses. Check back frequently. We will usually post lecture slides by the end of the day following a lecture (thus the next day), or latest two days after class. Posted slides are accumulative per topic.

PART 1: Intro and In-memory Indexing

(): Course Introduction and History of Databases [Slides]
(): Data System Architecture Essentials [Slides]
(): In-Memory Indexing (Hash Tables) [Slides]
(): In-Memory Indexing (SkipList, B+-Trees) [Slides]
(): In-Memory Indexing (Tries) [Slides]

PART 2: Concurrency Control

(): Concurrency Control (Latches) [Slides]
(): Concurrency Control (Locks) [Slides]
(): Multi-Version Concurrency Control [Slides]
(): Course Project Discussion

Part 3: Storage and File Organization

(): Storage Models, Data Layout, File Organization [Slides]
(): Be-Trees and SplinterDB [Slides]
(): Log-Structured Merge (LSM) Trees [Slides]

Part 4: Logging and Recovery

(): Logging and Recovery Protocols I [Slides]
(): Logging and Recovery Protocols II [Slides]
(): Logging and Recovery Protocols III
(): Row Stores vs Column Stores [Slides]

Part 5: Query Processing and Optimization

(): Query Processing I [Slides]
(): Query Processing II
(): Query Optimization I [Slides]
(): Query Optimization II
(): Incremental View Maintenance

Part 6: Modern Database Systems

(): Vectorization [Slides]
(): Databases on Modern Hardware [Slides]
(): Vector Databases [Slides]

Part 8: Project presentations

(): Student Project Presentations

Literature list

PART 1: Intro and In-memory Indexing

What Goes Around Comes Around... And Around... (Stonebraker & Pavlo SIGMOD Record 2004)
What's Really New with NewSQL (Pavlo & Aslett SIGMOD Record 2016)
Architecture of a Database System (Hellerstein et al. Foundations and Trends® in Databases 2007)
The Design and Implementation of Modern Column-Oriented Database Systems (Abadi et al. Foundations and Trends® in Databases 2012)
Massively Parallel Databases and MapReduce Systems (Babu and Herodotou Foundations and Trends® in Databases 2013)
A Study of Index Structures for Main Memory Database Management Systems (Lehman and Carey University of Wisconsin-Madison 1985)
The Bw-Tree: A B-tree for New Hardware Platforms (Levandoski et al. ICDE 2013)
The Adaptive Radix Tree: ARTful Indexing for Main-Memory Databases (Leis et al. ICDE 2013)
The Ubiquitous B-Tree (Comer Computing Surveys 1979)
A Comparison of Adaptive Radix Trees and Hash Tables (Alvarez et al. ICDE 2015)
BP-tree: Overcoming the Point-Range Operation Tradeoff for In-Memory B-trees (Xu et al. VLDB 2023)
Cache Craftiness for Fast Multicore Key-Value Storage (Mao et al. EuroSys 2012)
IcebergHT: High Performance Hash Tables Through Stability and Low Associativity (Pandey et al. SIGMOD 2023)
Zombie Hashing: Reanimating Tombstones in a Graveyard (Chesetti et al. SIGMOD 2025 2012)

PART 2: Concurrency Control

A Survey of B-Tree Locking Techniques (Graefe Transactions on Database Systems 2010)
Staring into the Abyss: An Evaluation of Concurrency Control with One Thousand Cores (Yu et al. VLDB 2014)
OLTP Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There (Harizopoulos et al. SIGMOD 2008)
On Optimistic Methods for Concurrency Control (Kung and Robinson Transactions on Database Systems 1981)
Serializable Snapshot Isolation in PostgreSQL (Ports and Grittner VLDB 2012)
Fast Serializable Multi-Version Concurrency Control for Main-Memory Database Systems (Neumann et al. SIGMOD 2015)
Scalable Garbage Collection for In-Memory MVCC Systems (Bottcher et al. VLDB 2019)
Opportunities for Optimism in Contended Main-Memory Multicore Transactions (Huang et al. VLDB 2020)
An Empirical Evaluation of In-Memory Multi-Version Concurrency Control (Wu et al. VLDB 2017)

Part 3: Storage and File Organization

External Memory Algorithms and Data Structures: Dealing withMassive Data (Vitter Computing Surveys 2001)
Small Refinements to the DAM Can Have Big Consequences for Data-Structure Design (Bender et al. 2019)
The Input/Output Complexity of Sorting and Related Problems (Aggarwal and Vitter Communications of the ACM 1988)
SplinterDB: Closing the Bandwidth Gap for NVMe Key-Value Stores (Conway et al. USENIX ATC 2020)
An Introduction to Bε-trees and WriteOptimization (Bender et al. Login 2015)
The Log-Structured Merge-Tree (LSM-Tree) (O'Neil et al. Acta Informatica 1996)
PebblesDB: Building Key-Value Stores using Fragmented Log-Structured Merge Trees (Raju et al. SOSP 2017)
WiscKey: Separating Keys from Values in SSD-conscious Storage (Lu et al. FAST 2016)
Column-Stores vs. Row-Stores: How Different Are They Really? (Abadi et al. SIGMOD 2008)
C-Store: A Column-oriented DBMS (Stonebraker et al. VLDB 2005)

Part 4: Logging and Recovery

A Survey of B-Tree Logging and Recovery Techniques (Graefe Transactions on Database Systems 2012)
ARIES/IM: An Efficient and High Concurrency index Management Method Using Write-Ahead Logging (Mohan SIGMOD 1992)

Part 5: Query Processing and Optimization

Access Path Selection in Main-Memory Optimized Data Systems: Should I Scan or Should I Probe? (Kester et al. SIGMOD 2017)
Bao: Making Learned Query Optimization Practical (Marcus et al. SIGMOD 2021)
An Overview of Query Optimization in Relational Systems (Chaudhuri et al. PODS 1998)
DBSP: Automatic Incremental View Maintenance for Rich Query Languages (Budiu et al. VLDB 2023)

Part 6: Modern Database Systems

BitWeaving: Fast Scans for Main Memory Data Processing (Li and Patel SIGMOD 2013)
SIMD-Scan: Ultra Fast in-Memory Table Scan using onChip Vector Processing Units (Willhalm et al. VLDB 2019)
Rethinking SIMD Vectorization for In-Memory Databases (Polychroniou et al. SIGMOD 2015)
Velox: Meta's Unified Execution Engine (Pedreira et al. VLDB 2022)
Pump Up the Volume: Processing Large Data on GPUs with Fast Interconnects (Lutz et al. SIGMOD 2020)
A Study of the Fundamental Performance Characteristics of GPUs and CPUs for Database Analytics (Shanbhag et al. SIGMOD 2020)
Automatic Database Management System Tuning Through Large-scale Machine Learning (Van Aken et al. SIGMOD 2017)
Neo: A Learned Query Optimizer (Marcus et al. VLDB 2019)
From Auto-tuning One Size Fits All to Self-designed and Learned Data-intensive Systems (Idreos and Kraska SIGMOD 2019)

Part 7: Vector Databases

Efficient and Robust Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Using Hierarchical Navigable Small World Graphs (Malkov and Yashunin TRANSACTIONS ON PATTERN ANALYSIS AND MACHINE INTELLIGENCE 2020)
DiskANN: Fast Accurate Billion-point Nearest Neighbor Search on a Single Node (Subramanya et al. NeurIPS 2019)
The FAISS Library (Douze arXiv 2024)
FreshDiskANN: A Fast and Accurate Graph-Based ANN Index for Streaming Similarity Search (Singh et al. WWW 2023)

Research best practice

[Azuma'19] Everything I wanted to know about C.S. graduate school at the beginning but didn't learn until later. 1997-2019
[Dalio'17] Principles by Ray Dalio. Also see Youtube videos.
[MIT'20] Version control (git)
[LaTeX'03] Indian Tex User group Latex Tutorial. An old but still nice comprehensive quick intro to LaTeX
[Oetiker'21] The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX.
[Trettin, Fenn'07] An essential guide to LaTeX usage: Obsolete commands and packages.
[Kurose'09] 15 pieces of advice I wish my PhD advisor had given me.