CS 480: Database Systems


Days and Times:
Mondays and Wednesdays, 11:00 am - 12:15 pm
Location:
LC (Lecture Center) C001
Instructor:
Abolfazl Asudeh
Office: CDRLC 5452 (email, home page)
Office Hours: Mondays, 12:30 pm - 2:30 pm
TA:
Mohsen Dehghankar (email, home page)
Office Hours: Wednesdays 3:30 - 5:30 PM (CDRLC 2404)


Course Project (designed by Mohsen Dehghankar)
Course Project's Github Repo
Top-5 Teams (with no order):
Date Topic Notes & Resources
Monday, 08/28/2025 Course Introduction Course Introduction Slides
Wednesday 08/30/2025 Introduction to Databases [Book Slides] Chapter 01: Introduction
Monday, 09/01/2025 Labor Day -- No Classes
Wednesday, 09/03/2025 Introduction to the ER Model [Book Slides] Chapter 6: Database Design Using the E-R Model
Monday, 09/08/2025 Project Overview. PostgreSQL Project Description (Prepared by Mohsen Dehghankar)
Wednesday, 09/10/2025 The ER Model (continued) [Class Notes] ERD
Monday, 09/15/2025 The ER Model (continued)
Wednesday, 09/17/2025 ER to Databased Schema. [Class Notes] ERDtoSchema
[Book Slides] Chapter 2: Intro to Relational Model (First 8 slides)
[Book Slides] Chapter 6: Database Design Using the E-R Model (Slides 40 to 53)
Monday, 09/22/2025 SQL: Part I, DDL [Book Slides] Chapter 3: Introduction to SQL (First 11 slides)
[Class Notes] SQL-PartI
Wednesday, 09/24/2025 SQL: Part II, DML [Book Slides] Chapter 3: Introduction to SQL (Slides 12 to 23)
[Class Notes] SQL-PartII
Monday, 09/29/2025 SQL: Part II, DML (continued) [Book Slides] Chapter 3: Introduction to SQL (Slides 24 to 29)
Wednesday, 10/01/2025 SQL: Part II, DML (continued) [Book Slides] Chapter 3: Introduction to SQL (Slides 30 to 42)
[Class Notes] SQL-PartIII
Monday, 10/06/2025 SQL: Part II, DML (continued) [Book Slides] Chapter 3: Introduction to SQL (Slides 42 to end)
[Class Notes] SQL-PartIII
Wednesday, 10/08/2025 Intermediate SQL: Part I, Joins [Book Slides] Chapter 4 : Intermediate SQL (Slides 1 to 44)
Monday, 10/13/2025 Midterm Exam
Wednesday, 10/15/2025 Intermediate SQL: Part II [Class Notes] Intermediate SQL
Monday, 10/20/2025 Functional Dependencies [Book Slides] Chapter 7 : Normalization
Wednesday, 10/22/2025 Normalization (1NF, 2NF)
Monday, 10/27/2025 Normalization (3NF, BCNF) [Class Notes] Normalization
... Part II of the course begins ...
Wednesday, 10/29/2025 Vector Databases: Part I: Introduction, VectorDB Model, and Challenges [1] Pan, James Jie, Jianguo Wang, and Guoliang Li. Survey of Vector Database Management Systems. The VLDB Journal 33, no. 5 (2024): 1591-1615. [slides]
[2] Han, Yikun, Chunjiang Liu, and Pengfei Wang. "A comprehensive survey on vector database: Storage and retrieval technique, challenge." arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.11703 (2023).
Monday, 11/03/2025 Vector Databases: Part I: Query Types, DML (Insert Models)
Wednesday, 11/05/2025 Vector Databases: Part I: Similarity Measures [Class Notes] Vector Databases: Part I
Monday, 11/10/2025 Vector Databases: Part II (Similarity Search): Range Queries; Nearest Neighbor Search
Wednesday, 11/12/2025 Vector Databases: Part II (Similarity Search): Partitioning: LSH, Quantization (K-means)
Monday, 11/17/2025 Vector Databases: Part II (Similarity Search): Tree Structures, Graphs
Wednesday, 11/19/2025 Vector Databases: Part II (Similarity Search): NSW, HNSW [Class Notes] Vector Databases: Part II
[1] (HNSW) Malkov, Yu A., and Dmitry A. Yashunin. "Efficient and robust approximate nearest neighbor search using hierarchical navigable small world graphs." IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence 42, no. 4 (2018): 824-836.
[2] Dehghankar, Mohsen, and Abolfazl Asudeh. "HENN: A Hierarchical Epsilon Net Navigation Graph for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search." arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.17368 (2025).
Monday, 11/24/2025 Retrieval-Augmented Generation [Class Notes] RAG Overview
[1] Gao, Yunfan, Yun Xiong, Xinyu Gao, Kangxiang Jia, Jinliu Pan, Yuxi Bi, Yixin Dai, Jiawei Sun, Haofen Wang, and Haofen Wang. "Retrieval-augmented generation for large language models: A survey." arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.10997 2, no. 1 (2023)
Wednesday, 11/26/2025 Student Wellness Day. No Classes
Monday, 12/01/2025 Project Presentation
Wednesday, 12/03/2025 Project Presentation