Data Management (academic year 2013/2014)



For whom is this course. This 6 credits course is for the students of the Master of Science in Engineering of Computer Science (School of Engineering) of the Sapienza Università di Roma. The language for both the course and the exam is English. The lectures will be held in the first semester (October 2013 - December 2013).
Prerequisites. A good knowledge of the fundamentals of Programming Structures (algorithms and data structures), Programming Languages, Databases (SQL, relational data model, Entity-Relationship data model, conceptual and logical database design), Theoretical Computer Science (computational complexity, computability) is required.
Course goals. The course presents the basic concepts of database systems, emphasizing the relational model. Several major issues related to the theory and the design of relational database systems are covered, including concurrency control, recovery, file and index organizations, query processing.


  • News
    • October 3, 2014 The second special exam session (only for "fuori corso" students) will be held on October 20, 2014, 3:45pm, classroom 8, via Eudossiana 18
    • August 29, 2014 The data about the course evaluation by the students are available in this page.
    • December 22, 2013 Errata corrige: At page 38 of the part 4-queryProcessing slides on query processing, the cost of the tuple-based nested-loop must be corrected to (B(S) + (pS × B(S) × B(R))).
  • Lecture material
    • M. Lenzerini, Lecture notes, Available in this site during the timeframe of the lectures
    • R. Ramakrishnan, J. Gehrke. Database Management Systems. McGraw-Hill, 2004
  • Tutor
    • Lorenzo Lepore - office hours: please, send an email to Lorenzo to fix an appointment.
  • Lectures
    • When: Wednesday [12:00pm - 1:30pm], Thursday [08:30am - 10:00am] and Thursday [10:15am - 11:45am] from October 2013 to December 2013
    • Where: Classroom B2 "Marco Cadoli", via Ariosto 25, Roma
    • Schedule
  • Lecture notes (slides to download)
    • Available during the period of time of the lectures

  • Exercises (slides to download)
    • Available during the period of time of the lectures

  • Topics covered
    • 1. The structure of a Data Base Management System (DBMS)
    • 2. Buffer management: buffer pool, replacement strategies, operations on the buffer
    • 3. Physical structures for data bases: Record and page organizations, Simple file organizations, Indexed file organizations
    • 4. Query processing: The notion of access path, Evaluation of relational algebra operators
    • 5. Concurrency management: The concept of transaction, The notion of serializability, Concurrency management strategies
    • 6. Recovery: Crash management, Classification of failures, Recovery strategies
  • Exam
    • Final exam: the final exam is constituted by a written exam, and a possible oral examinations. Students have 2 hours for completing the written exam
    • Past written exams: you can have a look at the texts of past exams
    • To book for the exam: Please, follow the on-line booking procedure.
    • Schedule of final exams:
      • First written exam: January 31, 2014
      • Second written exam: February 21, 2014
      • Special exam session (only for "fuori corso" and "part-time" students): March 28, 2014
      • Third written exam: June 3, 2014
      • Fourth written exam: July 4, 2014
      • Fifth written exam: September 15, 2014 , at 8:30am in classroom 8 in via Eudossiana 18
      • Second special exam session (only for "fuori corso" students): October 20, 2014. 3:45pm, classroom 8, via Eudossiana 18
  • Information about course evaluation by students
  • Information on past editions of this course
  • Office hours. Tuesday, 5:00 pm, at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica Automatica e Gestionale "Antonio Ruberti", via Ariosto 25, Roma, second floor, room B203 (if available), or room B217 (otherwise) -- please, look at the last minute news for the next office hours