I’m teaching again! Yesterday I’ve held the first lecture in the course “Databases: Implementation and Advanced Concepts” aka “Databases 2” for students of Health Care Engineering at FH-Joanneum
Yes, the title is a bit fancy. It is the second course concerning databases the students are taking. They’ve learned about SQL, relational theory, some database modelling topics (normalization etc.) in the previous course. I’ll be talking about a whole lot if topics: indexing, transactions, concurrency issues, authorization, security issues, performance, error handling, and then some. While most of the course will deal with relational databases (I’ll be using PostgreSQL for the practical work), I hope I can make room for some non-relational systems as well. I’ve thought about giving an intro to CouchDB, and about Object-oriented databases, and maybe XML database systems. But then, the curriculum is quite crammed as it is, and I’d rather have the topices treated thoroughly then wedge in anything I can think of. Hope I can restrain myself :–)
The first lecture went quite well I think. Students were attentive and engaged in the discussion. I’ve been a bit fast with my material, and I have to take care that I don’t align my tempo with the faster students so everybody benefits. Anyway, I’ve got a feeling this is going to be a good course, and I’m really looking forward to the next lectures.
