Hello 👋👋! This is the "about" page for MGT858 "Database Systems" at the Yale School of Management in Spring 2021. This is the first time I'm teaching this course and I'm super jazzed about it 🤩🥳. This is a living document — you can track changes by looking the git commits.
Jump to Covid info.
| Key | Value |
|---|---|
| 🎓 Course number | MGT858 |
| 📚 Units | 2 units in Yale College and equivalent elsewhere |
| 👥 Enrollment | Open to any student at Yale |
| 🕓 Meeting Time | Tues. & Thurs. 10:30-11:40 AM EST, March 23 - May 4, 2021 |
| 🏫 Meeting Location | Room 4410 in Evans Hall |
| 💻 Zoom link | Will be in Canvas |
| 📅 Calendar | Yale SOM Spring 2021 Academic Calendar |
| 🌐 Website | http://858.mba (down sometimes until class begins; requires Yale VPN) |
MGT858 introduces enrolled students to the database systems used in modern technology companies. You will emerge from this course an SQL ninja, well-prepared for tech sector roles including data scientist, product manager, and technical program manager. The first half of the course covers relational databases (those that use SQL, generally) and the latter half covers other kinds of systems including key-value stores, document databases (noSQL), distributed databases, graph databases, blockchain databases. We will discuss the business case for each of these database such that you ought to emerge from the course able to think of a software product or service and describe what kind of database systems ought to be used to build that product. You will not learn how to build such systems, though you will learn a little bit about their internals. You will definitely learn how these systems can be used to answer to the kinds of analytics questions you will encounter as a manager. The coursework includes twice-weekly homework assignments and a final examination, all of which require writing code and must be submitted using the git version control system. (Experience with git is not required; however, some experience programming is necessary. The particular language does not matter.) Students can expect to spend perhaps six hours per week on homework.
I don't know how many students will enroll in this course. As of Nov 24th, 2020, 65 SOM students are registered for the course. I suspect we'll get some non-SOM students who wish to enroll in the course and also some SOM students who drop. (Yale College students are welcome to enroll and will require a form signed by both Kyle Jensen and your residential dean.) I likely will not accept shoppers or auditors. The number of admitted students will be affected by the room to which we're assigned and, of course, by the social distancing practices in place at the time.
Yale SOM is doing its utmost to ensure you, students, have the best possible experience during the Covid-19 pandemic. I do not know right now what form teaching will take in Spring-2. I told the registrar that I would teach in "hybrid" mode in which I will teach from Evans every day, knowing that some of you will join online (by Zoom) and some of you will come to Evans as you are willing and able. I am committed to ensuring you have a fantastic experience no matter what mode of learning we find ourselves.
Please take a moment to review the student accessibility services information about COVID-19. If you have accessibility needs, please let me know so that I can meet them!
Because our class info and policies are tracked using git, you can see if and how they change over the course of the semester. Further, you have the ability to make changes yourself---please send me a pull request. Similarly, if you feel these documents are lacking, please open an "issue" on GitHub for this repo and we'll address the issue. Finally, because our git repo is hosted on GitHub, you can easily receive push notifications of changes to this repo. (Woot!)
The office hours for each of the teaching staff is shown below. Though, if you are reading this before the start of the semester, it is possible some staff are missing because they did not yet determine their schedule. Office hours will likely be held virtually.
Feel free to send an email if these times do not work for you.
| Person | Hours | Location/URL |
|---|---|---|
| Kyle Jensen | TBD | TDB |
| Nauman Charania | TBD | TDB. Slack for now! |
| Logan Disch | TBD | TDB. Slack for now! |
You will need to write code a lot of code this semester, mostly domain-specific query languages like PostgreSQL-flavored SQL, the ElasticSearch DSL, and the Redis query commands. It is possible you'll need to write code in a more general programming language like Python, Ruby, or Go. I haven't finished the homework assignments, so I don't know yet. I'm weary to make you write too much code because I want to make the class manageable for those with limited computer science backgrounds. But, I also want you to learn about database systems 😜 and so some coding will be required.
Most of the homework assignments and the final exam will require using the git
version control system for submission. You'll sign up
for GitHub, join the yale-mgt-858-spring-2021
organization on GitHub and
submit your assignments (in part) by pushing up code to GitHub. Usually I'll
give you some starter code like empty .sql files with examples queries.
When you complete your assignments, you'll make git commits and push those
commits up to GitHub so that I can download your answers and test them.
Obviously this requires knowing a little bit of git. I'll point you to some
git tutorials, but I'm not going to teach git in class. You are forewarned
😉. You can read more about git here.
You can complete the homework assignments on any kind of computer: Windows,
Mac, Linux, whatever. You'll almost certainly need to install some software in
order to do so. Obviously you'll need git. You might also need _ clients_ for
different database systems. For example, you will almost certain need a
PostgreSQL client or a Redis client. The $XYZ client is a piece of
software that connects to the $XYZ server in order to send the server
queries (or other commands) and interpret the responses. (Here, $XYZ is a
stand-in for PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, etc.) Now, it could be that you don't
want to set up the $XYZ client software on your computer, which would be totally resonable: it
can be a pain in the rear-end. For this reason, I will give each student an
AWS Cloud9 environment, for which I will pay
🤑. Cloud9 is an integrated development environment that includes a shell and
a code editor running on a Linux virtual machine. If you choose to use C9, rad.
But, it's not a panacea; if you use Cloud9 you'll be on a Linux environment so
you might have to learn some Linux-foo 🐧. I will use Cloud9 for all my
tutorials (eg. videos I make to assist you with homework) and I will offer
guidance on how to set up your Cloud9 environment in order to complete homework.
But, in general I will not offer guidance on how to install the $XYZ client/server
on your personal computer.
You can access Cloud9 through the link in your Dashboard on the class website. Therein you should see credentials for logging into Cloud9. You'll need to supply an account number, username, and password. All that is in your dashboard under the "user secrets" section. (I won't create the Cloud9 environments until the beginning of the semester.)
I am receiving a few emails from students about how best to prepare for the class. There's a few ways to think about doing so. One is to prepare narrowly for the content you're going to encounter. For SQL, in my person opinion, the best way to do so is going through the exercises at SQLBolt. I think that website is fantastic and it's part of the assigned reading in class. For the other database systems we'll use, the answer is less clear. You can read about ElasticSearch (the representative full-text search database we'll use); ClickHouse (the representative columnar store we'll use); Redis (the representative caching database we'll use); MongoDB (the representative noSQL database we'll use); and Neo4j (the representative graph database we'll use).
A second way to prepare is to level-up your computer skills in general, particularly your *nix skills. A good resource for doing so is MIT's missing semester course.
Finally, you might think about getting your personal computer set up for writing code. That usually starts with choosing a package manager (homebrew on Mac OS and Chocolatey on Windows) and choosing a good code editor. I use VSCode and NeoVim.
Also 😜, you'll want to be familiar with git. You can find many tutorials online. Your use of git this semester will be super simple because you won't generally have collaborators. If you like, you can use a git GUI. I use GitHub Desktop often, mostly for line-by-line staging of changes.
There is no textbook for the course. Readings will be posted on the class website.
This class will be an inclusive environment. If you see behavior that you feel is discriminatory, particularly from the professor or teaching staff, we encourage you to avail yourself of one or more of the following resources.
- Preventing and Responding to Sexual Misconduct at Yale Booklet
- Yale Sexual Harassment and Assault Response & Education (SHARE)
- Diane Temple in SOM Human Resources and Sheri Scully in the SOM AASL.
- Yale Title IX Coordinators (SOM’s Title IX Coordinator is Rebecca Udler)
- Yale's Live Safe App
- Office for Equal Opportunity Programs
We will have roughly ten homework assignments and ten pre-class quizzes. That's a lot of work! All of the homework assignments will be submitted to GitHub using git. Further, you'll be responsible for at least one in-class news item.
Most classes are preceded by a quiz that you take through the class website. The quizzes are short, timed, multiple choice, mandatory, and ultimately a crude and imperfect assessment of the degree to which you understand the pre-class reading material. The following are my reasons for giving pre-class quizzes:
- It makes you think about the upcoming class!
- Empirical evidence shows that the testing effect increases your understanding and retention of material.
- They give you a low-stakes, super-small reward for coming to class prepared.
- They ensure that your classmates are better prepared for class and therefore more fun to speak with.
- They are short, you can google for stuff during the quiz, and you can drop your lowest two scores, so they are not stressful.
You take the quizzes via the class website. Click on "meetings" then click on the meeting for a particular class. (You can also take the quizzes via the class API. If you're a masochist, contact me! 🤪) A button that says "Begin Quiz" will appear if you can take the quiz. Once you begin a quiz, you can change your answers until either 15 minutes after you began the quiz, or the closing time of the quiz, which is usually the beginning of class. So, if you start a quiz five minutes prior to class, you will only have five minutes to submit the answers to the quiz questions! The quizzes are graded only after the quiz closes. Kyle will sometimes go over the content of the quizzes at the beginning of class.
You can take the quiz if all of the following are true:
- The quiz is not labeled as "draft". Draft means the teaching staff are still working on the quiz questions.
- The current time is after the quiz is "open". Quizzes usually open five days before the meeting/lecture to which the quiz corresponds.
- The current time is not after the quiz is "closed". Quizzes usually close when the meeting/lecture to which the quiz corresponds begins.
- You did not previously take the quiz or you already started the quiz, but your time to take the quiz is not expired. All quizzes this semester will last 20 minutes.
Once you click "Begin Quiz", you will see a list of multiple choice questions displayed in an HTML form. For each question, you should select the options you desire and then click "Save Answers" at the bottom of the page. Unless there is an error, the options that you selected will be labeled as "saved", so that you have visual confirmation.
A few notes about the quizzes...
- The quiz questions are not uniformly drawn from material in the pre-class reading. Some pre-class reading will be over-represented and some under-represented either, usually because of heterogeneous importance of the pre-class reading material.
- We want the quiz questions to test your conceptual understanding. We do not want to ask "gotcha" questions or simple recall questions. However, we will fall short in those aspirations often.
- Some quiz questions will have obvious answers. We do this in part to remind you of important concepts.
- If you feel like a quiz questions is unfair or that the answer is wrong, please tell Kyle. It is easy for Kyle to "fix" a bad question.
- Questions that have multiple correct answers are indicated as such in the class website.
- There is a timer at the bottom of the page in the quiz UI on the class website. It shows the approximate time you have left to finish your quiz. Please monitor your time.
- It is 100% fine to google for the answers to quiz questions or to look in the reading material. You may not rely on another human being for real-time support on the quiz and you may not share information about the quiz with other students.
Grading will follow the official Yale SOM grading policy. That is essentially a forced curve: a certain number of students get each grade: HH, H, etc. In my opinion, it's a quite generous curve (though the ethics of grading on a curve are dubious. I will compute the grades for non-SOM students by overlaying their school's grading scale on top of the SOM curve. There's not a 1-to-1 correspondence. Your letter grade will be based on your sum grade and your sum grade will be determined roughly as follows (I reserve the right to make changes. The most common change I make is dropping assignments.)
| Component | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Homework | 35% |
| Quizzes | 35% |
| Final exam | 20% |
| Participation | 10% |
The ethics of counting participation in the grade are also a bit dubious 🙁. But, I'm including it for consequentialist reasons: your participation makes the class more fun for all of us and most importantly for me 🤣.
This is a half term course. You can see the schedule here: https://858.mba. Notice that we will meet on 4/8 even though Yale College does not.