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Information for the Final Exam

posted ‎‎Dec 9, 2008 6:08 PM‎‎ by Michael F
The final will be held on Tuesday, 12/16, 5pm-8pm, in 390 Hearst Mining.   As stated in class, the final is comprehensive.   Roughly half of it will be on material covered since midterm 2.     For studying purposes on the material covered since midterm 2, you may find this problem set (with answers) helpful in addition to the materials used in discussion section (as well as the book, lectures, and projects, of course!).   The exam will be closed book, but you can bring up to three 8.5x11" "cheat sheets" (e.g., the ones from the two midterms plus a new one).   Be sure to bring your student ID.

In terms of topics, as usual, you are responsible for what was covered in
  1. lecture,
  2. discussion section,
  3. all the assignments, and
  4. the relevant parts of the textbook.  These are:
  • Ch 1-5 (except 4.3.2 on the Domain Relational Calculus)
  • Ch 8-11    (except 9.2 RAID)
  • Ch 12-15     (except 13.4 Minimizing I.O cost)
  • Ch 16-18   (except 17.5.2 Cc in B+trees,  17.6.2 Timestamp-based CC, 18.7 Media and 18.8 Other Approaches)
  • Ch 19-20  (except 19.8 Other dependencies, 20.6 Tools. 20.10 Impact of Concurrency)
For optimistic concurrency control (section 17.6.1) you should understand the basic idea and the fundamental differences between "pessimistic" approaches like locking and "optimistic" approaches like the one we described in class.   We won't however, expect you to understand the details of the "validation" phase of the optimistic algorithm, since we only covered it briefly in lecture.