Course Notices | COMP9315 18s2

Final Marks

Posted by John Shepherd Tuesday 20 November 2018, 12:36:07 PM, last modified Tuesday 20 November 2018, 02:21:19 PM.

Sorry guys, but marking is dragging on and on and on and on and on ...

It's unlikely that we'll have the final marks in by the deadline for us to submit marks. This means that you will all likely end up with a grade of "LE" for the course when marks are published. All that this means is "You lecturer didn't get marks in on time"; it's not a problem with anything you've done.

In the meantime, lab and assignment marks will gradually appear via sturec or Webcms3 or however else you check your marks. If you have a problem with any mark, send me email and I'll add it to my TODO list, and it will all get cleaned up once marks are finalised.

Let me be more precise about timings

final marks need to be submitted by November 26 to make it into the December 5 release of results
your marks will probably be finalised around December 2/3/4
even if I "handed them in" on December 3, they won't make it through "the system" in time for December 5 release
I will post final results on the web site as soon as we know them

Final Exam

Posted by John Shepherd Wednesday 07 November 2018, 05:29:05 PM.

Hmm ... looks like it was a bit long/hard ...

Don't panic ... if the results are overall bad, I'll scale up.

Final Exam Details

Posted by John Shepherd Sunday 04 November 2018, 08:40:52 PM, last modified Sunday 04 November 2018, 10:08:44 PM.

The Final Exam will be held on Wednesday 7 November in the Ainsworth Level 3 Labs.

Reading time starts at 13:45. Exam writing time is from 14.00 until 17.00.

You are all allocated to a specific lab. I believe the details are available via

https://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs9315/18s2/seating/final/register.cgi/allocations

What you don't get in the exam environment:

Python is not available in the exam environment
dcc is not available in the exam environment
you may not bring calculators in (use bc or xcalc )
you do not have access to the COMP9315 web site
you may not use your mobile phone or even have it on your desk

What is available

Course Notes (!!!)
C and PostgreSQL reference material
Unix man pages
and, of course, gcc , gdb
text editors : gedit, vim, nano, emacs
xterminals (you can make as many as you like)
check and submit

What you should bring

a pen or pencil
your student card

Good Luck.

MyExperience

Posted by John Shepherd Wednesday 31 October 2018, 10:04:22 PM.

If you haven't already done the MyExperience survey (and thanks to those who have), you're almost out of time. It close at midnight on Thu 1 Nov. Why not take a break from your exam revision and give us some feedback?

Pre-exam Consultations

Posted by John Shepherd Monday 29 October 2018, 03:43:26 PM, last modified Tuesday 30 October 2018, 11:42:34 AM.

I have consultations Tue 30 Oct 3-4 , Thu 1 Nov 2-4, Tue 6 Nov 1.30-3.00. For the first two, you'll be competing with COMP1521 students. For the Melbourne Cup consult, the COMP1521 exam is over, so they won't be around.

Note: change to time of Tue 30 Oct slot, to avoid meeting clash.

Assignment marks?

Posted by John Shepherd Friday 26 October 2018, 11:41:29 AM.

Sorry everyone, but the way things are going, your assignment marks will not be ready before the final exam. Assignment 1 might be done by Monday, but Assignment 2 ...?

In any case, there will be plenty of time to sort out any problems with assignment marks before results for the course are finalised.

I think it would be more useful for you at the moment if I prepare solutions for the sample exams, and then get back to sorting out the assignment marking.

Your quiz marks are already done, as a number of you have clearly already noticed.

Seating for Final Exam

Posted by John Shepherd Thursday 25 October 2018, 09:12:09 PM.

The Final Exam will be held in the CSE Labs. If you've managed to avoid them so far, I'd strongly suggest that you familiarise yourself with them before the exam.

You are allocated to a particular seat in a particular lab. The seating allocations are now available.

If you have DSU requirements, let us know ASAP.

Revision Material

Posted by John Shepherd Wednesday 10 October 2018, 02:09:15 PM.

Since some of you seem very keen to start revising, here's the state of play on the materials on the web site:

Theory Exercises ... I've made the rest available (Ex01..Ex10)
Prac Exercises ... there aren't any more to make available
Past Exams ... I'll add solutions for the 14s2 exam, and add Q & A for the 16s1 exam
Course Notes ... I've made all sections visible (I thought they were!) and I'll update section J

If you notice errors in any of the above, please let me know ASAP. Errors in the Course Notes are particularly relevant, because you get access to these in the Exam.

Assignment 2 Updates

Posted by John Shepherd Saturday 06 October 2018, 02:44:44 PM, last modified Thursday 18 October 2018, 02:19:16 PM.

As people find things that need fixing in the assignment 2 spec and code, I'll put links to the relevant forum posts here. You can decide how to handle them: get code from updated ass2.zip or simply make changes in the code you've got.

Note that none of the above problems will affect the auto-marking.

Assignment 2 Groups

Posted by John Shepherd Sunday 30 September 2018, 01:17:59 PM.

If you want to change your partner for the second assignment, edit the group under the Groups page.

The current entries in the Groups page are the ones I'm assuming for Assignment 1. If they're not correct, let me know via email.

If the Assignment 1 group is correct, but you want to tell me about a partner who made no contribution to Assignment 1, send me email.

Assignment 2 ... finally!

Posted by John Shepherd Friday 28 September 2018, 05:03:33 PM.

After spending most of the "break" week sorting out the code and spec, Assignment 2 is now available for your perusal.

The first thing to do is to read the spec and ask for clarification on any unclear points. The other first thing to do is to look through my code and point out any glaring errors.

Assignment 2 ... Coming Soon

Posted by John Shepherd Friday 21 September 2018, 09:42:35 AM.

I wanted to finish assignment 2 last weekend ... and then I wanted to finish it on Wednesday ... and now I want to finish it today ... but I have wall-to-wall meetings today and am going away for the weekend, so I can't reasonably see it being available before Monday evening.

Sorry about the delay.

No Lecture on Tuesday (Sep 18)

Posted by John Shepherd Monday 17 September 2018, 07:15:07 AM, last modified Monday 17 September 2018, 09:16:29 AM.

I need more time to get your second assignment sorted out, and so I'm postponing the lecture that was scheduled for Tuesday 18 September until Week 11.

Note: the Thursday (Sep 20) lecture will run as usual, including a Q&A on the Assignment.

Assignment 2 ... what kind?

Posted by John Shepherd Wednesday 05 September 2018, 11:09:05 AM.

There are two possibilities for Assignment 2:

modify the PostgreSQL engine
write some code independent of PostgreSQL

Either way, you'll be writing C code, changing parameters and reporting/analysing the results of tests.

I've set up a poll so that you can give me preferences. Please give some feedback before the end of the week.

Thinking of Dropping COMP9315?

Posted by John Shepherd Friday 31 August 2018, 08:36:39 AM.

If you do it today (Fri 31 Aug), then you won't have to pay for the course *and* it won't appear on your academic transcript.

If you're an international student, dropping courses can have Visa implications.

Assignment 1

Posted by John Shepherd Monday 13 August 2018, 09:35:00 PM, last modified Sunday 19 August 2018, 09:44:54 AM.

The first assignment is now available; due before midnight on Sunday 2nd September. It's worth reading the suggested resources, and, of course, reading the assignment spec thoroughly, before launching into the implementation.

Quiz 2 Now Open

Posted by John Shepherd Monday 13 August 2018, 08:18:58 PM.

Quiz 2 is now open (has been since 1am Mon 13 Aug ... no attempts as of 8pm Mon 13 Aug).

You must submit it before 11:59pm on Sunday 19 August.

Assignment Groups

Posted by John Shepherd Wednesday 08 August 2018, 09:14:04 AM.

If you haven't formed an assignment group by the end of Week 3, I'll assume that you're doing Assignment 1 as an individual.

If you want to work as an individual, please form an assignment group with just one member.

You form assignment groups on the Webcms3 Groups page. You need to login first.

Reminder: Quiz 1 Due

Posted by John Shepherd Sunday 05 August 2018, 08:29:10 PM.

Quiz 1 is due midnight tonight (Sunday 5 August). 60 people still haven't done it. It's worth marks.

Exercise P01 Glitch

Posted by John Shepherd Sunday 29 July 2018, 08:20:33 PM.

The P01 spec was missing one instruction. If you don't do this (add set max_wal_senders = 4 to the postgresql.conf file), then your server may not start. If you forget, the message that you get in the log file makes it reasonably obvious what the problem is.

Downloadable Slides

Posted by John Shepherd Thursday 26 July 2018, 10:52:47 AM.

Each week, I'll put a copy of the slides in PDF format under the Lectures for that week, so that, if you want, you can print a copy and bring it to the lectures to write notes on. (Or, if you don't want to waste paper, you can bring your device and write the notes on your copy of the PDF)

Undergrad Enrolments in COMP9315

Posted by John Shepherd Monday 23 July 2018, 02:38:05 PM.

If you're an undergraduate student trying to enrol in COMP9315, you will need to ask the CSE Student Office to enrol you manually, which they will do as long as you meet the pre-reqs ((COMP1927 or COMP2521) and COMP3311)

Welcome to COMP9315 18s2

Posted by John Shepherd Sunday 22 July 2018, 10:51:29 PM.

Welcome to COMP9315 18s2!

In this course, we'll plumbs the depths of PostgreSQL's internals, while learning about all of the clever data structures and algorithms that people have invented over the years to deal with large amounts of data. Eventually, we'll also look at some new databases, developed to solve specific large data problems that have emerged since the advent of the web.

Read the Course Outline before we get started. It's on the course website.

And speaking of the course website ...

https://webcms3.cse.unsw.edu.au/COMP9315/18s2/

Note that we're testing out the 2 x 2-hour lectures/week over 10 weeks in preparation for UNSW3+ next year. Should be interesting.

I'll be putting up some polls soon to try to gauge your knowledge on some topics that I hope you will already know.

The first lecture is on Tuesday 24 July at 4pm in Mathews Theatre B.

See you then, jas

COMP9315 Notices

Notices