Princeton University
Computer Science Dept.

Computer Science 425
Database Systems

Andrea LaPaugh

Notes on the Project and Final Exam

Spring 2000

Project Assessment

Students have asked for some guidelines on how I will grade the project. The core will be graded as follows:

Note: correctness of implementation means correctness of implementing the left-deep plan algorithm. Implementing another algorithm for the core will be penalized. (Alternative algorithms can be considered in the extensions).

Extensions will be considered as "extra credit", i.e. it is possible to get a high grade without doing any extensions. Extensions can earn up to 25 extra points above the 100 points for the core.

Remember that each project must be demonstrated by the project team sometime between Wednesday May 10 and Thursday May 18.

Final Exam

The final exam has been changed to a take-home exam. It will NOT be cumlative; rather, it will cover the material not covered by the midterm exam. This material begins with "tree structured indexes" and goes throught the end of the semester. In includes Chapters 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, parts of 16 as assigned on the schedule page, 18, parts of 19 and 20 as assigned on the schedule page, and 22. However, since we have not had any homework on the topic of the internet and databases, I will not draw heavily on Chapter 22. Also, because you are implementing a query optimizer for your project, I will not emphasize Chapters 13 and 14. You are responsible for all topics in the semester in the sense that you are expected to understand the earlier concepts upon which later material builds. In format, the final exam will look much like the midterm exam: it will be about the same length and will have the same rules about referencing sources.

The take-home final exam will be available starting 10am on Wednesday May 10th and is due 5pm Tuesday May 16th. (The original final exam for this course was scheduled for Tuesday May 16, 1:30-4:30 pm.) Note that the window for doing the final exam and the window for demonstrating projects are almost identical.

The problem sets related to the material for the final exam have been shorter so that you would have more time to work on the project. Because of this, less material from each topic has been covered in the problem sets. I recommend you work out other problems in the textbook on the topics we have covered. Remember that there are on-line solutions for the odd-numbered problems.

A.S. LaPaugh Tue Apr 25 15:14:07 EDT 2000