COSC 416 Special Topics in Database Systems - NoSQL Databases

Spring (Winter Term 2) 2012/2013 - University of British Columbia Okanagan

Overview

This offering of COSC 416 covered NoSQL databases including Hadoop, Map-Reduce, Apache Pig/Hive, MongoDB, Redis, Neo4J, and BerkeleyDB. Each week student groups selected a database, presented it, and created an assignment for other students. Although the assignments were of varying quality, students learned a lot of different databases, especially the system they selected for presentation to the class. The in-lab midterm exam on Map-Reduce, Pig, and Hive was very challenging.

On-line Resources

• Syllabus

Student Performance

Of the 22 registered students (including 5 graduate students) everyone passed the course. The average GPA was 3.65.

Comments

This was a very fun course to teach as we were all learning and experimenting with technologies in the lab. Instructor rating was 5.

Strengths of the Course

• "Very fun and practical class. I learned a lot more about database programming (and other types of programming) than I ever had from any other classes in UBC."
  


• "Nice to learn cutting edge technologies and to experiment with each thoroughly in lab time."
  


• "Covered a lot of content in what seemed like a short period of time. The course was engaging, challenging, and at times fun."
  

Weakness of the Course

• "Most of the course content was taught by students (many with very little teaching/presenting experience)."
  


• "It's hard to narrow down a weakness, but; the midterm was too hard. Yet the course was still balanced out with no final exam, and lots of time to complete assignments."
  


• "The midterm was very difficult, and part of the reason was because of the large dataset we were given so it felt like we were being tested partly on our ability to tediously trace through a large dataset, not how well we knew what we were being tested on."
  

Most Enjoyable Part of the Course

• "The project where we teach the class about a new NoSQL database."
  


• "The course was pure hands on work, very little lecture, and when we had them, they were only 20 - 30 min. It was awesome."
  


• "Everything we learned was applied right away as we were inside the lab at all times."