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CMU 15-445/645 :: Intro to Database Systems (Spring 2026)

This is Carnegie Mellon University's best course on the design and implementation of database management systems. We will go through through data models (relational, document, key/value), storage models (n-ary, decomposition), query languages, storage architectures (heaps, log-structured), indexes + filters (trees, hash tables, vector), transaction processing (ACID, concurrency control), recovery (logging, checkpoints), query processing (joins, sorting, aggregation, optimization), and parallel architectures (multi-core, distributed). We will also use case studies on open-source and commercial database systems to illustrate these techniques and trade-offs. This course is appropriate for students that are ready to commit to a database-centric lifestyle and flex their systems programming skills.