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Level 2 · M.Sc

MSc Databases & Data Systems

Data & Databases · Live · v0

Databases and data systems — a from-scratch engine (storage, SQL, transactions) checked against every major real system.

Path type

Data & Databases

Requirements

Open entry

Enrollment

€9.95

Deadline

Next cohort starts 2027-09-06 (AY 2027/28)

Length

~1 year · 42 phases

Language

English · Español

Content freshness

Curriculum updated 2026-08-23 · content rev ca036c28

Cortex Credits (CC)

126 CC
What are Cortex Credits?

Syllabus

View the phase syllabus

0. Foundations & tooling
1. What a database is & the data-systems landscape
2. The relational model & relational algebra
3. SQL I: tables, types & CRUD
4. SQL II: joins & set operations
5. SQL III: aggregation, subqueries, windows & modern SQL
6. Keys, constraints, three-valued logic & upserts
7. ER modeling & schema design
8. Normalization & denormalization
9. Transactions & ACID from the user's seat
10. SQLite in depth
11. PostgreSQL in depth
12. MySQL/InnoDB in depth & choosing relational
13. Pages, records & heap files
14. The buffer pool
15. Indexing internals I: B+trees
16. Indexing internals II: LSM-trees & embedded KV
17. Write-ahead logging & crash recovery
18. MVCC & isolation internals
19. SQL front-end: parsing & binding
20. Execution I: the iterator model
21. Execution II: joins & sorting
22. Execution III: aggregation & a rule-based optimizer
23. Indexing strategies I: choosing indexes
24. Indexing strategies II: beyond B-trees & data-skipping
25. EXPLAIN, plan-cache & query-plan mastery
26. Full-text search & FTS5
27. Denormalization, materialized views & incremental maintenance
28. Caching & connection pooling
29. Compression & single-node partitioning
30. Key-value & cache: Redis · Memcached · etcd
31. Document stores: MongoDB · CouchDB
32. Wide-column stores: Cassandra · ScyllaDB · HBase
33. Graph databases: Neo4j · Dgraph
34. Search & vector engines
35. Analytics, columnar OLAP & time-series
36. The operational database
37. Distributed data & NewSQL
38. Data-in-motion: streaming, CDC & choosing a paradigm
39. Capstone: lynxdb & the polyglot workbench, complete
40. Hardening, postmortem & "What's Next"
41. Portal integration

Syllabus →

Enrolment prerequisites

• A verified account and admissions-committee approval.