The Database teaching cluster had a meeting today and came up with the
following proposal for a slight re-structuring of database teaching:

Current courses:

COMP9311 Database Systems

	Taken by postgrad students; assumes no previous computing
	experience; covers database application design and
	implementation as well as discussion of DBMS internals.

COMP3311 Database Systems

	Taken by undergrad students with two years' CS background;
	covers essentially the same material as COMP9311, but with
	some Web/DB interface stuff added.

COMP9314 Next Generation Database Systems

	Taken by postgrads and upper-level undergrads; assumes some
	background in DB and Java; covers various topics, and this
	ran with two quite distinct "flavours" (OODB+WebDB and XML+DB)

COMP9315 Database Systems Implementation

	Taken by postgrads and upper-level undergrads; assumes some
	DB background and a solid data structures background; covers
	data structures and algorithms used in the implementation of
	RDBMSs

There has long been a debate about whether COMP9311 and COMP3311 are
more or less equivalent. Given the radical difference in student
background, we feel that it is not useful to run them with more or
less the same material (the internals stuff is wasted on zero
computing background postgrad students, while undergrads could 
handle more depth). The decision was made to give up on any idea
of treating COMP9311 and COMP3311 as equivalent and run a truly
introductory course, focussing on DB application design and
development, and a brief overview of the critical topics in DBMS
implementation. Such a course would also be useful for undergrads,
but not at 3rd year level, so we would like to propose a level 2
DB course (with only COMP1021 as a pre-req) to run as a re-named
COMP9311.

First proposal:

COMP2311/COMP9311 ... Introduction to Database Systems

With this change, a natural successor would be a course to explore
in more depth the implementation issues that were summarised in
the introductory course. Thus we propose to convert COMP3311 into
a primarily database internals subject, equivalent to COMP9315,
although possibly with some more practical (DB tuning) elements
added.

Second Proposal:

COMP3311/COMP9315 ... Database System Implementation

COMP9314 is currently schizophrenic (OODB+WebBB and XML+DB). The
plan would be to create two new subjects to replace it, with each
subject being taught by two of the database lecturers and focussing
on more areas related to their research (e.g. data mining, XML,
e-commerce technologies, Web+DB).

Third Proposal:


COMP9316 ... XML and e-Commerce Technologies
COMP9317 ... Data Mining and Web Databases

(An alternative to this would be to stick to the more generic title
 COMP9314 Next Gen DB and allow students to enrol in the subject
 twice, for the different versions)

Finally, we would like to use the Readings in Computer Systems subject
(or maybe a new readings in Database Systems subject) to run a
research-level database course, where each of the 4 DB staf would
be responsible for 1/4 of the course.

Fourth Proposal:

COMP9xxx ... Readings in Database Systems


TIMETABLE

Given the current very high demand for database courses, we envisage
the following timetable for running the above subjects:

Session 1
COMP2311/COMP9311
COMP3311/COMP9315
COMP9316
Readings

Session 2
COMP2311/COMP9311
COMP3311/COMP9315
COMP9317
Readings


Apart from the readings subject, this is (more or less) equivalent
(possibly a little higher) to the current level of database teaching.


TEACHING ALLOCATION

The above timetable assumes that there will most likely be only
3 of the 4 database lecturers available each session, with the
other being on sabbatical, teaching elsewhere, etc.

How this work is actually partitioned up among the staff is left
open, but we have all expressed a preference to be able to get
our teaching commitments out of the way in one session, and spend
the other session on research. In other words, we're assuming
that 2 of the 4 db lecturers would partition up three DB subjects
plus the reading subject between them in one session.

Boualem, Raymond, Xuemin and JAS