CompSci 316 (Fall 2013):
Introduction to Database Systems

Index

• Course Description
• Staff
• Time and Place
• Books
• Web, Sakai, and Piazza
• Computing
• Grading
• Standards of Conduct

Instructor: Jun Yang
Web: http://www.cs.duke.edu/~junyang/
Email domain: cs.duke.edu, user: junyang (address is user@domain)
Office: D327 LSRC
Office hours: Tuesdays 2:40-3:40pm; Thursdays 12:25-1:25pm and 2:40-3:40pm; or by appointment

TA: Risi Thonangi
Web: http://www.cs.duke.edu/~rvt/
Email domain: cs.duke.edu, user: rvt (address is user@domain)
Office: North 306
Office hours: Wednesdays 4-5pm; Thursdays 11:30am-12:30pm; Fridays 10-11am

• Publisher's book page: http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/academic/product/0,3110,0131873253,00.html
• Amazon's book page: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0131873253

Most of the course materials, including the syllabus, lecture notes, reading assignments, homeworks, programming FAQs, etc., will be available through the course Web page (http://www.cs.duke.edu/courses/fall13/compsci316/).

There is an email address that reaches everybody in the class as well as the instructor and the TA: domain: cs.duke.edu, user: compsci316 (address is user@domain). Only announcements should be sent to this address. Specific questions should be directed to the instructor and the TA, or better yet, Piazza (see below for further information). Please check your email regularly, as important announcements and information will be sent via email.

We will use the Sakai course management system for grades and sample solutions. Sample solutions will be posted in the Sakai under "Resources."

For discussion and Q&A, we will use Piazza. You do not yet have a Piazza account, you will receive an email with sign-up instructions. Rather than emailing questions to the course staff, you should post your questions on Piazza, which will be monitored closely by the course stuff.

You can also send anonymous feedback to the instructor.

Thanks to a grant from Microsoft, you will have 6-month free access to Windows Azure, which allows you to run a virtual machine in the cloud for the assignments and project in this class. The virtual machine will run Linux. Details will be announced by the second week of the class.

Parts of the homework assignments will be completed online on Gradiance, an online service pioneered by one of the authors of the textbook, Prof. Jeffrey Ullman at Stanford. One of the best features of Gradiance is that you are permitted to test yourself on a particular topic as many times as you like. You receive immediate feedback for each attempt, which avoids the shortcoming of the traditional submit-and-then-wait-for-grades assignments where one error in understanding can permeate solutions to multiple problems and does not get rectified until much later. We encourage you to continue testing on each topic until you complete the part of the assignment with a 100% score. Gradiance access is free. For more information on obtaining and using Gradiance, please see Getting Started with Gradiance.

Under the Duke Community Standard, you are expected to submit your own work in this course, including homeworks, projects, and exams. On many occasions when working on homeworks and projects, it is useful to ask others (the instructor, the TA, or other students) for hints or debugging help, or to talk generally about the written problems or programming strategies. Such activity is both acceptable and encouraged, but you must indicate in your submission any assistance you received. Any assistance received that is not given proper citation will be considered a violation of the Standard. In any event, you are responsible for understanding and being able to explain on your own all written and programming solutions that you submit. The course staff will pursue aggressively all suspected cases of violations, and they will be handled through official University channels.