Hacker News Reader

Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

Missed the obvious pun: "Everything Looks Like a Null"

I do wish practical database development/administration was taught in college. It's such a necessary skill...

For people who are interested, Harvard's CS165[1] is a great course about how to build storage engines for relational databases.

Topics include memory vs disk I/O, the memory hierarchy, buffer pools, B-Tree indexes, query optimization, and more. Throughout the course, you have a project to build a columnar relational datastore with C.

I don't think the lecture videos are all publicly available, but you can learn a lot from the slides and readings.

[1]: http://daslab.seas.harvard.edu/classes/cs165/

Thanks for this link. Never before had I come across a course with learning objectives as aligned to my learning goals as this. Much appreciated.

Looks great. What level of student would that course be aimed at do you know (e.g. 2nd year CS undergrad, 3rd year)?

I would say, 3rd year or 4th year CS undergrad.

Pre-requisites would include a foundational understanding of C pointers, tree data structures, and algorithmic complexity (i.e. time and space complexity).

Regular old sql Databases are not sexy so sadly they dont get the attention they truly deserve

I think they are. I learned to code running an old (hand written) forum as a kid (MySQL + PHP) I tend to use postgresql and python now days but my mind is heavily trained to use that relational core and when NoSQL became popular it was so annoying to see the “hackers” in my hometown writing slow systems in mongo and JS because they never were introduced to relational dbs and thought they were becoming deprecated.

I’m glad that phase has passed and glad nosql has its place as a key value store (though I’m sure the younger hacker scene likely still relies on nosql as it doesn’t take as much effort to spin up a store and get results; in contrast you need to think ahead about what tables you create and how they relate to each other.)

I don't get that. Databases underlie everything. It's foundational.

When you are viewing the world through 19 year old eyes and a mind filled with naiveté and dreams of revolutionizing the world, then studying the technology literally your grandparents where using seems like taking a history class. Why waste your time with SQL when you could be studying CUDA backed, AI driven, graph databases?

Thankfully my dreams of a career in science were crushed before I pursued one in programming so I don't relate to that.

It used to be when I was in uni. Then everyone complained it was not cutting edge enough for the job market.

"Everything Looks Like a NULL"*

No one likes to read sloppily formatted SQL.

I like it

"* Looks LIKE NULL" perhaps?

Nothing looks LIKE NULL as that would always evaluate to NULL, which would be filtered out in a WHERE clause.

I've seen some really great courses offered by MIT and CMU on building database systems (will have to find the exact courses). And a database development course is something I would love to see from OMSCS (from Georgia Tech). Sadly, right now, the only DB course offered is not very rigorous and really targets how to use a database from an application development standpoint (i.e. create DB, tables, SQL queries etc)

I assume you are refering to this course https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeYBdghaIjc&list=PLSE8ODhjZX...

and the follow up advanced course https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdW5RKUboKc&list=PLSE8ODhjZX...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com