Three types of projects are acceptable for this course:
The annual ACM SIGMOD Conference is one of the major research conferences in the general area of data management. The 2012 SIGMOD Conference will take place in Scottsdale, Arizona in late May. There is a student programming contest associated with the conference. Five finalists will be invited to the conference to present their work, and the winning team will receive a $5000 USD prize.
CS648 students may participate in the SIGMOD 2012 Programming Contest as their course project. The deliverables for this project are:
Contest projects will be graded using the following criteria:
Design, implement, and document a useful and novel feature in PostgreSQL or another DBMS. The subject of the project is up to you. For example:
The deliverables for an implementation project are:
Implementation projects will be graded using the following criteria:
Write a research survey paper on a relevant topic. Surveys should be comprehensive, well organized, and self-contained. Although your source papers will probably use different terminology and notation, your survey must be internally consistent throughout. A survey that is constructed by simply gluing together a sequence of short summaries of others' papers is not acceptable. Instead, your survey should provide significant added value above and beyond the source material, through interpretation, organization and explanation.
If you are not sure what a survey paper should be like, you should
review existing surveys before embarking on your project.
A good source of survey papers is the journal
ACM Computing Surveys, the contents of which you can
obtain on-line through the ACM
Digital Library.
For example, you might review the following relevant (though
somewhat dated) survey:
Graefe, Goetz.
Query evaluation techniques for large databases.
ACM Computing Surveys, 25(2), June 1993.
The contents of the ACM Digital Library are access-controlled, but you
should be able to access the Library freely from any machine on
the UW network.
Notice how the survey reads as a self-contained, coherent, organized overview of the topic, with appropriate references to the surveyed literature. By reading such an article one can (a) come up to speed on a topic (b) obtain references to the literature in case it is desirable to dig deeper. The scope of your survey must be more limited than this example's, because your survey will be shorter. However, I expect the same type of presentation.
Write in your own words and use proper attribution where necessary. Do not plagiarize your sources! Please review Waterloo's academic integrity policies and guidelines, and follow them. If you have questions, contact the instructor.
The only deliverable for a survey project is the survey paper itself. The maximum length of the survey paper is 15 pages. The paper is due on April 2nd.
Survey papers must be done individually.
Survey papers will be evaluated using the following criteria:
Your project proposal should describe the project you intend to do. For a survey, you should briefly describe the topic of your proposed survey. You should also include a brief (2-5 entries is fine) preliminary bibliography to show you have taken the initial steps to identify major papers in the area you propose to survey. For an implementation project, you should briefly describe what you propose to implement. For a group project, be sure to identify both members of your group. For the SIGMOD programming contest, your proposal need only indicate that you intend to participate in the contest and identify the members of your group (this can just be done in an e-mail message - no PDF required.)
Proposals should be submitted by e-mail to the course instructor. For group projects, only one member of the group should submit.
Submit all project reports/papers in PDF format. Use the two-column ACM proceedings format for your report. Templates are available from the ACM.