The exam will be from 6am to 6pm with open books and open notes. Many of the topics have already been covered in the quizzes and mid term exam. Topics covered will be:

Solutions: Solutions are available here

• Storage

  • Compute disk access costs.

  • Answer questions about organization of data on disk:

    • How to represent pointers to tuples? pointer swizzling?

    • How to organize tuples on pages (fixed size vs. variable size, NULL values)?

    • How to deal with insertions, updates, deletions?

    • How to manage free-space?

• SQL: Write SQL queries and evaluate them.

• Relational algebra

  • Write relational algebra expressions.

  • Translate SQL into relational algebra.

  • Equivalences.

• Index structures

  • B-trees and B+-trees: Execute operations on such trees (insert,delete) and answer questions about their properties (e.g., number of children).

  • Hash indicies: Execute operations on hash indicies (insert, delete) and answer general questsion about these data strcutures (e.g., when to rebuild a directory for extensible hashing).

• Logical query optimization

  • Result size estimation.

• Implementations of relational operators and their I/O cost and runtime complexity

  • Joins: Nested Loop variants, Merge join, Hash join.

  • Aggregation, Set-operations, Scans.

• Schedules

  • Classes of Schedules

  • Determining whether a schedule belongs to a certain class

  • Given a set of transactions create a schedule of a certain class