This is intended to give you a sense of what I think is important from the course so far, and what I will be thinking of when creating the exam.

Here are some disclaimers. This is not a contract. I may have inadvertently left something off this list that ends up in an exam question. I make no guarantees that the exam will be 100% limited to items listed below. Moreover, I will not be able to test all of this material given the time limitations of the exam. I will have to pick and choose some subset of it.

You are permitted one 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper with notes (both sides) for use as a reference during the exam.

Here are the specifics: Students should be able to...

Indexing: Be able to show detailed examples of how inserting and deleting works in B+ trees and extendable hashing when sufficient assumptions on implementation are provided. Be able to explain advantages and disadvantages of each of the above techniques, and why each might be chosen. Be able to work out approximate I/O costs for retrieving data using a particular indexing technique.

Query Evaluation: Be able to explain and/or demonstrate...

• algorithms used for selection, projection, join
• how approximate costs for such operations are calculated
• various join algorithms such as simple nested loops, block nested loops, multi-block nested loops, index nested loops, sort merge join, and hash join, and I/O costs associated with these techniques
• external sort, and "replacement sort" optimization (heapsort idea), and associated costs

Query Optimization: Be able to evaluate alternative query evaluation strategies to determine which is more likely to be chosen. Be able to generate query evaluations strategies for a particular query, and indicate how to decide amongst them. Be able to describe how query optimizer approaches above problems, and show specific examples.