The exam will be closed books and closed 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