Level 2 · M.Sc

Databases & Data Systems

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