Adv. Database Management Systems
How databases work inside — storage engines, B+ trees, query execution, transactions, recovery, and distribution.
📎 Assignments & course material (original docs shared in the course)
What's actually inside a database?
⏱ 19 min read · 📖 4 topics
Welcome to your very first database class.
The Storage Engine — Pages & Records
⏱ 22 min read · 📖 4 topics
In Session 1 we looked at the big picture: how a database is organised into layers, from the query parser at the top down to the bits sitting on disk.
The Storage Engine — Heap Files & Free Space
⏱ 20 min read · 📖 4 topics
Welcome back!
Where the database keeps its pages while it works
⏱ 22 min read · 📖 4 topics
Disks are slow and memory is fast — so a database keeps a private stash of recently used disk pages in RAM and reuses them instead of fetching from…
Keeping the right pages in memory
⏱ 28 min read · 📖 4 topics
In Session 4 we built the buffer pool — the database's in-memory cache of disk pages — and we used plain LRU to decide what to throw out.
How databases find a row without reading the whole table
⏱ 26 min read · 📖 4 topics
Imagine a phone book with a million names and no alphabetical order.
How databases delete, build, and choose the right index
⏱ 22 min read · 📖 4 topics
Welcome back!
How your SQL becomes a plan the database can run
⏱ 17 min read · 📖 4 topics
You type a line of SQL and an answer comes back — but a lot happens in between.
How a database actually runs your query
⏱ 18 min read · 📖 4 topics
In Session 8 we watched your SQL get parsed and turned into a plan — a tree of operations.
How databases sort, join, and group data that's too big for memory
⏱ 27 min read · 📖 4 topics
In Session 9 we met the building blocks of query execution — operators, scans, and how rows flow through a plan.
How a database turns your SQL into the fastest possible plan
⏱ 20 min read · 📖 4 topics
You write a short, simple SQL query — and behind the scenes the database has to choose how to actually run it, out of thousands of possible ways.
Transactions — how databases keep promises
⏱ 18 min read · 📖 4 topics
Today we learn what happens when a database has to do several things that all have to succeed together — like moving money between two accounts.
How a database keeps everyone honest at once
⏱ 20 min read · 📖 4 topics
In Session 12 we learned what a transaction is and why we want ACID guarantees.
What happens to your data when the database crashes?
⏱ 24 min read · 📖 4 topics
Power cuts out.
How modern databases store and scan data fast
⏱ 23 min read · 📖 4 topics
For most of this course we treated a database as one kind of thing — tables on disk, a B+ tree index, transactions.
When one machine isn't enough: databases that span many computers
⏱ 19 min read · 📖 4 topics
This is the final session of the whole DBMS course — congratulations on making it here!