Level 2 · M.Sc

Advanced Databases & Data Systems

MSc syllabus · 42 phases · ~1 year

Every unit this programme teaches, in the order it is taught. Headlines only — the material itself opens once you are enrolled.

Dates, price and prerequisites

Phase 0 From engineer to researcher
Phase 1 The storage design space at research depth
Phase 2 Modern hardware for data systems
Phase 3 In-memory indexing
Phase 4 Concurrency primitives
Phase 5 Measurement discipline
Phase 6 Reading the literature
Phase 7 B+tree engineering at depth
Phase 8 LSM at depth
Phase 9 Buffer management research
Phase 10 Specialized index internals
Phase 11 Text-search internals
Phase 12 Compression at depth
Phase 13 Learned index structures
Phase 14 Storage capstone
Phase 15 Rewriting & algebraic equivalences
Phase 16 Cardinality estimation
Phase 17 Cost models
Phase 18 Join ordering
Phase 19 Optimizer architecture: Volcano/Cascades
Phase 20 Robust & adaptive query processing
Phase 21 Optimizer capstone
Phase 22 Beyond tuple-at-a-time: vectorized execution
Phase 23 Columnar storage & open formats
Phase 24 Query compilation
Phase 25 Parallel execution: morsel-driven
Phase 26 Joins & hash tables at depth
Phase 27 Aggregation & window functions at scale
Phase 28 Execution capstone: lynxdb-col
Phase 29 Serializability theory at depth
Phase 30 Isolation in the real world
Phase 31 Serializable snapshot isolation
Phase 32 Modern in-memory concurrency control
Phase 33 The MVCC design space
Phase 34 Logging & recovery at depth: ARIES
Phase 35 Concurrency capstone
Phase 36 Consistency models as contracts
Phase 37 Impossibility & trade-offs: CAP, PACELC, FLP
Phase 38 Consensus I: Paxos
Phase 39 Consensus II: Raft implemented
Phase 40 Distributed transactions
Phase 41 Partitioning & elasticity at depth