Final Exam
Tuesday, Dec 9, 2025 ,2:00pm - 4:00pm,CDRLC 4426
The exam will be closed books and closed notes. The topics have been covered in homework assignments 1 + 2. The exam will be designed to take 120 minutes to complete.
Topics
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Storage
- Compute disk access costs.
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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.
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Relational algebra
- Write relational algebra expressions.
- Translate SQL into relational algebra.
- Equivalences.
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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 question about these data strcutures (e.g., when to rebuild a directory for extensible hashing).
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Logical query optimization
- Result size estimation.
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Implementations of relational operators and their I/O cost and runtime complexity
- Joins: Nested Loop variants, Merge join, Hash join.
- Aggregation, Set-operations, Scans.
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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