Lecture Readings - COP 5725 Database Management Systems Fall 2026

Each lecture has a primary chapter reading from Garcia-Molina, Ullman, Widom Database Systems: The Complete Book (referred to below as GMW). Five featured paper readings throughout the semester anchor the conceptual material in primary research literature. Supplementary papers expand each topic for graduate-level depth.

A consolidated paper index with local PDFs lives at ufdatastudio.com/cop5725fa26/papers. Featured paper entries below include a direct PDF link.

Section 1: Foundations (Weeks 1-4)

Week 2: History and the Relational Model

Primary: GMW Ch. 1 (Worlds of Database Systems), Ch. 2.1-2.3 (Relational Model)
Featured paper: Codd, E.F. “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks.” Communications of the ACM 13(6), 1970. PDF · DOI
Supplementary:
- Chamberlin, D. and Astrahan, M. et al. “A History and Evaluation of System R.” CACM 24(10), 1981.
- PostgreSQL data types documentation (numeric, text, date/time, JSON, arrays, geometric, range).

Week 3: Relational Algebra and ER Modeling

Primary: GMW Ch. 2.4-2.5 (Algebra), Ch. 4.1-4.6 (ER)
Supplementary:
- Chen, P. “The Entity-Relationship Model — Toward a Unified View of Data.” ACM TODS 1(1), 1976.

Week 4: Functional Dependencies and Normalization

Primary: GMW Ch. 3 (Design Theory)
Supplementary:
- Kent, W. “A Simple Guide to Five Normal Forms in Relational Database Theory.” CACM 26(2), 1983.
- Codd, E.F. “Further Normalization of the Data Base Relational Model.” Courant Symposia, 1972.

Section 2: SQL Mastery (Weeks 5-7)

Week 5: SQL Fundamentals

Primary: GMW Ch. 6.1-6.4
Supplementary: PostgreSQL docs Chapter 7 (Queries), Chapter 9 (Functions and Operators).

Week 6: Advanced SQL I (Subqueries, CTEs, Window Basics)

Primary: GMW Ch. 6.3.6, 10.2; PostgreSQL docs Ch. 7.8, 3.5
Featured paper: Hirn, D. and Grust, T. “A Fix for the Fixation on Fixpoints.” CIDR 2023. PDF

Week 7: Advanced SQL II (Window Frames, Recursion, Views)

Primary: PostgreSQL docs Ch. 9.22; GMW Ch. 7-8
Supplementary:
- Eisenberg, A. et al. “SQL:2003 Has Been Published.” SIGMOD Record 33(1), 2004 (window functions, MERGE).
- Mumick, I.S., Pirahesh, H., Ramakrishnan, R. “The Magic of Duplicates and Aggregates.” VLDB 1990.

Section 3: Programming and Tools (Week 8)

Primary: psycopg documentation, DuckDB documentation, pandas DataFrame interop with DuckDB.
Supplementary:
- Raasveldt, M. and Mühleisen, H. “DuckDB: An Embeddable Analytical Database.” SIGMOD 2019 (preview before full reading in Week 16).

Section 4: Storage and Indexing (Weeks 9-11)

Week 9: Storage Hierarchy

Primary: GMW Ch. 13.1-13.4
Supplementary:
- Hellerstein, J.M., Stonebraker, M., Hamilton, J. “Architecture of a Database System.” Foundations and Trends in Databases 1(2), 2007 (Red Book Ch. 1).

Week 10: Row vs Column Stores and B+ Trees

Primary: GMW Ch. 13.5-13.8, 14.1-14.3
Featured paper: Stonebraker, M. et al. “C-Store: A Column-oriented DBMS.” VLDB 2005. PDF
Supplementary:
- Boncz, P., Zukowski, M., Nes, N. “MonetDB/X100: Hyper-Pipelining Query Execution.” CIDR 2005.
- Comer, D. “The Ubiquitous B-Tree.” ACM Computing Surveys 11(2), 1979.

Week 11: Hash Indexes, PostgreSQL Indexes, External Sorting

Primary: GMW Ch. 14.4, 15.4; PostgreSQL docs Ch. 11
Supplementary:
- O’Neil, P. et al. “The Log-Structured Merge-Tree (LSM-Tree).” Acta Informatica 33, 1996.
- Leis, V., Kemper, A., Neumann, T. “The Adaptive Radix Tree.” ICDE 2013.
- Kraska, T. et al. “The Case for Learned Index Structures.” SIGMOD 2018.

Section 5: Query Processing and Optimization (Weeks 12-13)

Week 12: Join Algorithms and Iterator Model

Primary: GMW Ch. 15.1-15.5
Supplementary:
- Graefe, G. “Volcano: An Extensible and Parallel Query Evaluation System.” IEEE TKDE 6(1), 1994.

Week 13: Vectorized Execution and Optimization

Primary: GMW Ch. 16
Featured paper: Leis, V. et al. “How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really?” PVLDB 9(3), 2015. PDF
Supplementary:
- Selinger, P. et al. “Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System.” SIGMOD 1979.
- Neumann, T. “Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware.” PVLDB 4(9), 2011.

Section 6: Transactions, Concurrency, Recovery (Weeks 14, 16)

Week 14: Transactions and Two-Phase Locking

Primary: GMW Ch. 18.1-18.5
Supplementary:
- Bernstein, P.A. and Goodman, N. “Concurrency Control in Distributed Database Systems.” ACM Computing Surveys 13(2), 1981.

Week 16: MVCC, Recovery, Distributed and Modern

Primary: GMW Ch. 17, 18.7-18.9, 20-22
Featured paper (Recovery): Mohan, C. et al. “ARIES: A Transaction Recovery Method Supporting Fine-Granularity Locking…” ACM TODS 17(1), 1992. PDF
Featured paper (Modern): Raasveldt, M. and Mühleisen, H. “DuckDB: An Embeddable Analytical Database.” SIGMOD 2019. PDF
Supplementary:
- Diaconu, C. et al. “Hekaton: SQL Server’s Memory-Optimized OLTP Engine.” SIGMOD 2013 (MVCC).
- Bailis, P. et al. “Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations.” PVLDB 7(3), 2014.
- Corbett, J.C. et al. “Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database.” OSDI 2012.

Curated External Resources

Red Book (Bailis, Hellerstein, Stonebraker, 5th ed.): http://www.redbook.io/
CMU 15-445 lectures (Pavlo, YouTube): https://15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/
DuckDB Internals: https://duckdb.org/docs/internals/overview
PostgreSQL Source Reading Guide: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Developer_FAQ

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