Project Information

The term project is an important part of this course. Projects can be conducted individually, or in teams of two or three. There are three types of projects that are acceptable in this course:

1. Research projects: Pick a research problem in self-managing database systems and work on it; or a research problem from some other area (your area!) with a self-managing database twist to it.
2. Survey projects: Write a survey about some topic in self-managing database systems. The expectation for survey projects is higher than for research projects, since the risk is lower.
3. Case study projects: Do a case study about the self-management features in current database systems. For example, you could study the self-management capabilities in some commonly occurring usage scenario, or you could compare the self-management capabilities of several systems. For this kind of project, I expect you to go well beyond reading the white papers and product documentation for the system you are studying. I expect to see a working demo at the end of the term.

Successful projects could lead to publishable results. Obviously, publishing is not a requirement, but this is the mindset that you should have.

Project Ideas

You will need to form your team and come up with a project idea in the first month of class. I strongly encourage you to come up with your own project ideas. Choose some open question from the papers on the reading list. Or pick a problem that interests you from outside of databases and give it a self-managing database twist. I will try to help by presenting some possible directions for projects in the first class.

Timeline

• 9 October: One page project proposal due.
• 28 November: Project presentations in class.
• 18 December: Project report due.

Project Proposal

The project proposal should be one page long in 10 point font. It should include the title of the project, names of the team members, a description of the problem you will work on, why it is important, and how you will attempt to solve it. Try to clearly identify your objectives, methodology, milestones, and metrics for success.

Project Report

The project report should be written in research paper style. It should motivate your problem, discuss related work, and present your solution in detail including its benefits and limitations. The report should be 10 pages maximum (20 pages for survey projects). It should be formatted in the two-column ACM proceedings format, using one of the ACM SIG Proceedings Templates. The ACM templates include headings for "Categories and Subject Descriptors," "General Terms," and "Keywords." You do not need to use any of these headings.

Deliverables

• Project report in hard copy and PDF.

• Source code and scripts required to replicate your solution.

• 30 minute presentation.

• Demo if applicable.

Evaluation

You will be evaluated on the depth and novelty of your work, on the quality of your report, and on your research methodology (problem definition, choosing the correct level of abstraction, cleanness of  implementation, experimentation methodology, etc.).