CMU 15-721 (Spring 2016) Database Systems | Hacker News Reader

CMU 15-721 (Spring 2016) Database Systems

15721.courses.cs.cmu.edu

125 pointssnaga28 comments

Professors like Andy Pavlo are probably the best thing to happen in the Database area. Existing DBMS courses are very outdated and most profs teaching them lack passion. It's always the same boring exercises from the "cow" textbook. In his words, he's "trill as fuck"

From the syllabus:

" Trigger Warning: The material presented in this lecture uses explicit language and discusses certain situations in database management systems that may be triggering to some students."

> material presented in this [...] may be triggering to some students."

Can't be serious as I didn't see MUMPS in the list.

(Who gets that joke wins a free trip to Wisconsin)

You work for Epic?

Nah, but heard stories from someone working there. I can see how that could become a trigger warning easily.

(Apparently I needed a "dry db nerd humor" trigger warning, as I go downvoted since nobody got the database joke).

Living just North of Massachusetts, I got the joke.

There was a similar issue some years ago, where a popular author on Oracle PL/SQL began polluting his technical books with politically-charged text in the examples. In this case, though, the "trigger" was not something so innocuous as terminology such as master-slave. The author's justification here: http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly//news/feuerstein_10...

I'd hesitate to describe master-slave as innocuous to begin with.

Understood. I meant to make a distinction between commonly accepted terminology, and free-form text where the author chooses to make controversial statements. And yes I'm aware of the existing controversy over use of master-slave in technology documentation.

So sad that they are forced to put such "warnings" on this kind of courses.

I guess people signing up for a database course should expect triggers to feature at some point

If they have to be warned about triggers what are they going to do when they see a multi-page stored procedure :P

Where? [1]

[1]:http://15721.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2016/syllabus.html

At the very bottom of the course schedule here [1]

[1]:http://15721.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2016/schedule.html

Probably referring to the Master-Slave terminology

Awesome, I was just looking for a course in database systems.

It's a pity that Jennifer Widom's db-class isn't offered anymore in a classical manner (I don't like self-paced minicourses).

EDIT: Oh, it's a course in database systems internals, not basics... Does anyone know of a good introductory course in databases ?

Stanford had a great Introduction to Databases MOOC on Coursera a few years back. I don't think it's still available on Coursera but you can still take the self paced course directly from the Stanford website.

https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/DB/2014/SelfPaced/abou...

Thanks for posting OP, can someone comment on how this compares to mit 6.830 (hopefully someone who has taken both the courses :)) http://db.csail.mit.edu/6.830/sched.html http://db.csail.mit.edu/6.830/notes.html

For folks interested there's another implementation specific db course https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs346/2015/ although the lectures are not on youtube

This (CMU Course) is a graduate research-oriented course, with lots of research papers as required reading.

6.830 is a standard introductory database course (although somewhat more advanced than other introductory database courses like Stanford CS245, or Berkeley CS186).

Nicely designed pages, especially the Schedule one. 1996-clean, but with make-up ...

Also got curious about the 'Piazza' top link, looks like an external forum system: https://piazza.com/cmu/spring2016/15721/home (49 students, 273 posts, 3 staff, but nothing much public)

Yep, piazza is widely used nowadays in universities. A board where students can post questions and receive answers from other students, TAs, and instructors. Not meant to be public.

By taking this course and referring others to it you're directly supporting CMU - and indirectly supporting CMU's activities related to breaking the Internet for the FBI/US:

https://www.google.com/search?q=CMU+TOR

CMU SEI is more or less a separate institution that was founded with government money. Very little relation to the workings of the school, but it's still unfortunate that the work was done under the CMU name.

The SEI is located like a half-mile from the main part of the campus of the school (it's basically on the campus of University of Pittsburgh). Some of the professors in the CS department might work under SEI grants, but yeah, the SEI is basically an independent research organization that is heavily government-funded (like almost every research institution). They do a lot of non-evil things too, especially related to the challenges of building and maintaining extremely large applications (and the organizations that build and maintain them).

Fun fact; their building was used as a police station in The Dark Knight Returns.

It's unfair to think of CMU as an 'evil' entity just because of what some people in one particular and small department did.

There's a lot of really good work that comes out of CMU, including the department that helped the FBI.

EDIT: furthermore, SEI was doing independent research into the security of TOR. The FBI subpoena'd CMU to give up the results/contents of the research which is what ultimately helped the FBI do what they wanted.

If the department believed their research was important to the security of Tor, why did they not share it with Tor? Why did CMU do research in the wild on a live system and not get criminal complaint filed against them? What has CMU done to insure this does not happen again?

The department had every intention of sharing the information at, I believe, Blackhat. A lot of research (especially security related research) is funded and approved by the government. Before they were able to give the talk at Blackhat, the government stopped them from doing so. Since the provided funding was from the government, they had to comply to avoid legal issues.

This is a matter of legal debate about the intentions and methods of the government, IMO. To reiterate I don't think it's fair to blame students/faculty/researchers for not breaking the law and agreements that allowed them to conduct the research in the first place.

As for what CMU has done to insure that this does not happen again... I don't know.

I appreciate your commentary, but how is linking to a query with Google and all of its real-time tracking of users across all its real estate helping anybody? Why support them if not CMU?

https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=CMU%20Tor

I linked to the HTML version for you, so it works without JS enabled. If you do this over Tor, that is the wise bet given your interest in reversing IP addresses through careless Tor usage pivotal to that investigation and others.

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