| Title | Due Date | Material |
| Project 0 | 02/05 | Project 0 Doc |
| Project 1 | 02/19 | Project 1 Doc |
| Project Proposal | 03/01 | |
| Mid-semester Report | 03/31 | Report Template |
| Preliminary Project Report | 04/27 | |
| Final Project Report | 05/06 |
A quick dev. project to sharpen C++ skills and to prepare for the upcoming research/dev project. For project 0, you are tasked to implement a simple zone map data structure. A zone map maintains min/max value ranges of one or more columns over contiguous sets of data blocks. The objective of the project is to implement and evaluate the performance of zonemaps with varying workloads. More information about the project can be found here.
A project that will expose you to the two fundamental relational data system architectures (row-stores and column-stores). The objective is to deploy and experiment with a row-store system (PostgreSQL) and a column-store system (MonetDB) and compare them for different queries in order to showcase when each system should be used. More information about the project can be found here.
Every student should complete a semester-long class project. The students can decide between a systems project and a research project.
A system project sharpens your systems skills and provides background on state-of-the-art systems, data structures and algorithms. For a successful systems project you will design and implement a systems component in C or C++, and you will deal with low-level system implementation details like memory allocation and management, cache-aware processing, parallel and concurrent processing and a deeper understanding of read/write performance trade-offs, and performance scalability. Systems projects will be carried out by groups of three students.
This year we will have two topics for a systems project.
A research project, on the other hand, aims at challenging the state-of-the-art. The goal is (i) either to better understand an open research problem through analysis and benchmarking, or (ii) to solve open problems through new designs and proof-of-concept implementations. The ultimate goal of a research project is to give a taste of research to students, and ideally lead to publications. When working on a research project, the student will interact with the instructor and the teaching assistants closely. Students will work in groups of three students.
We have a number of possible research topics below. The students can also propose their own project (subject to instructor's approval).
Concurrency-Aware Graph/Tree Traversal Algorithms
Benchmarking Dual B+-trees for Near-Sorted Workloads
Data Placement Strategies in Distributed Databases
Query-driven compaction in LSM-trees
SPDK application for modern NVMe Storage Devices