Introduction to Database Systems

UC Berkeley, Spring 2026

Alvin Cheung

akcheung@cs.berkeley.edu

Pronouns: he/him/his

OH: TBD

Hi all! I’m an EECS faculty and my group works on data systems research. Looking forward to meeting you all!

Natacha Crooks

ncrooks -AT- berkeley.edu

Pronouns: she/her

OH: TBD

• Our class is currently full with a waitlist. Instructors don't have enrollment codes and we'll let the waitlist play out.
• If you are a concurrent enrollment student, please describe how you have satisfied this class's prerequisites in your request.
• If you plan to add late, make sure you contact the staff first to see if you can make up the missed assignments before officially adding the class.
• All lecture videos are posted on bcourses after class.

Zoom link for live lectures.

Week	Date	Lecture	Discussion	Vitamin	Project
1	Jan. 21	0. Introduction and 1. SQL I. (Zoom only!)	No Section
2	Jan. 26	2. SQL II
	Jan. 28	3. Disks, Buffers, Files
3	Feb. 2	4. Cost Models and Indexes
	Feb. 4	5. B+ Trees
4	Feb. 9	6. B+ Trees and Costs
	Feb. 11	7. Spatial & Vector Indexes
5	Feb. 16	President’s Day
	Feb. 18	8. Buffer Management
6	Feb. 23	9. Sorting and Hashing
	Feb. 25	10. Joins and Midterm 1 Review
	Feb 26	Midterm 1 (8-10pm)
7	Mar. 2	Iterators and Relational Algebra
	Mar. 4	Query Optimization: Plan Space
8	Mar. 9	Query Optimization: Costs and Search
	Mar. 11	Transactions and Concurrency I
9	Mar. 16	Transactions and Concurrency II
	Mar. 18	Recovery I
10	Mar. 23	Spring Break
	Mar. 25	Spring Break
11	Mar. 30	17. Recovery II
	Apr. 1	18. Midterm 2 Review
	Apr. 2	Midterm 2 (8-10pm)
12	Apr. 6	19. Parallel Query Processing
	Apr. 8	20. Distributed Transactions: 2-Phase Commit
13	Apr. 13	21. Distributed Transactions: Paxos
	Apr. 15	22. NoSQL I: data models
14	Apr. 20	23. NoSQL II: MongoDB
	Apr. 22	24. NoSQL III: MapReduce and Spark
15	Apr. 27	25. TBD
	Apr. 29	26. TBD
16	May. 4	RRR Week	RRR Week - Review Sections
	May. 6	RRR Week
17		Final (TBD)