A Model-Independent Component Database Framework (Master Thesis, Ongoing)
Author
Description
While there have been significant changes in the industry and research, education on database systems has remained less adaptive and seems to be rather homogenous across institutions. In particular there is often a lack of modernized and practical curricula in regards to database system education that, to some extent, is less aligned with the current industry needs, techniques of modern database management systems and sought after skills by the industry. Though there are some advanced courses that inspect commercial tools and their implementations in more detail, such as the Design and Implementation of Database Systems Internals course at the University Tübingen that looks into concepts and techniques implemented in DuckDB. However it is hard to strike a balance between timeless theoretical concepts, usually taught at higher education, and the ever changing skills that are of interest for the industry.
This thesis aims to design a minimal standard for interoperability of components, targeted to the needs of an educational database system. To our knowledge no such standard exists for database internals. The conceptual and concrete work of this thesis should enable a strong foundation for building educational systems that can be easily extended to suit the needs of various lectures, exercises and projects. Besides using it for education it could also be used to test new algorithms in an isolated way, without having to modify other components in the system. Further the minimal standard could function as an inspiration for more holistic standards that targets commercial components and database systems. As last deliverable a guide, or an example curriculum, should be developed on how the resulting system of this thesis could be incorporated in an existing database system course. At this point it should be clear that the overall goal this thesis is not a high performance system, but rather a system that allows for flexibility and ease of extensibility for teaching and research.
Start / End Dates
2026/10/06 - 2027/04/05