Patterns in Data Management: A Flipped Textbook

This book is not a standard textbook on database techniques. This book was written extending and complementing preexisting educational videos on database technology I designed and recorded in winter 2013/14. The main goal of these videos was to use them in my flipped classroom “Database Systems” which is an intermediate-level university course designed for B.Sc. students in their third year or M.Sc. students of computer science and related disciplines. Though in general my students liked both the flipped classroom model and (most of) the videos, several students asked for an additional written script that would allow them to quickly lookup explanations for material in text that would otherwise be hard to re-find in the videos. Therefore, in spring 2015, I started working on such a course script which more and more evolved into something that I feel comfortable calling it a book. One central question I had to confront was: would I repeat all material from the videos in the textbook? In other words, would the book be designed to work without the videos? I quickly realized that writing such an old-fashioned text-oriented book, a “textbook”, wouldn’t be the appropriate thing to do anymore in 2015. My videos as well as the accompanying material are freely available to everyone anyways. And unless you are sitting on the local train from Saarbrücken to Neustadt, you will almost always have Internet access to watch them. In fact, downloading the videos in advance isn’t terribly hard anyway. This observation changed the original purpose of what this book would be good for: not so much the primary source of the course’s content, but a different view on that content, explaining that content where possible in other words. In addition, one goal was to be concise in the textual explanations allowing you to quickly re-find and remember things you learned from the videos without going through a large body of text.

Therefore you will find several things in this book, including: (1) links to videos as well as slides I designed for this course, (2) for each video a textual summary of the video content phrased as questions and answers plus the most important slides and graphics from the videos, (3) Q&As as well as (4) exercises.

Table of Contents

Chapter 0 Introduction
Chapter 1 Hardware and Storage
Chapter 2 Data Layouts
Chapter 3 Indexes
Chapter 4 Query Processing Algorithms
Chapter 5 Query Planning and Optimization
Chapter 6 Recovery