In Fall 2008, I had the pleasure of TAing Database Systems with Sam Madden, Mike Stonebraker, and Evan Jones. I figured that I could take notes to help students follow the lectures while clarifying any confusing points that were raised during discussion. It would also help me avoid the embarrassment of forgetting something mentioned during a lecture and having students explain it to me during office hours:).

I decided to take notes in plain text, mostly out of laziness. This turned out to be a challenge for drawing things like query plans, but forced me to distill explanations into a conversational tone that provided an alternative to traditional diagrams.

Some students in the class told me that they benefited from and enjoyed the notes, and so I decided to open them up for reuse by the rest of the web community. The topics are as follows:

Feel free to take a read through the notes, and shoot me an email with requests, corrections, or just to let me know you read something.

For completeness, This work by Adam Marcus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Enjoy!