Welcome to Comp Sci 364: Information Storage and Retrieval. Data pervades the world around us and provides a significant competitive advantage to organizations that harness its potential. A database management system (DBMS) provides an environment to manage this data effectively, minimizing pitfalls such as data redundancy while providing security and supporting simultaneous access by many users. In this course, our focus will be relational databases, which are one of the most widely used paradigms for organizing data. We will study the Structured Query Language (SQL), which is the standard interface to interact with relational databases, and the properties that relational databases provide to support distributed applications. We will also survey some of the recent trends in this field as the volumes of data continue to grow exponentially year after year.

Take a few minutes to review the syllabus; schedule; and overview of the first lesson, being sure to note the initial reading assignment.

This course website will be updated throughout the semester. Announcements will be posted on the course homepage. You should check back frequently for updates and specifically review the lesson notes that identify the reading assignment(s) that should be completed prior to each lesson.