This is very debatable. The courses look like they were recorded in the 90s.
The DB course particularly sticks out. My undergrad's DB course was fathoms harder than this. This is what you'd expect a highschooler should be able to learn through a tutorial not a university course.
If it doesn't talk about systems calls like mmap, locking and the design of the buffer pool manager, it's not a university Database course it's a SQL and ER modelling tutorial.
Respectfully, I think you should do more research.
The OMSCS program is well known and well respected in the tech industry. It's a masters degree from the currently 8th ranked computer science school in the U.S.
The university make no distinction between students who take the courses online, vs in person. I.e., the diploma's are identical.
I’ve taken graduate-level courses in databases, including one on DBMS implementations and another on large-scale distributed systems, and I also spent two summers at Google working on Cloud SQL and Spanner. Database research goes further than DBMS implementation research. There is a lot of research on schemas, data representation, logic, type systems, and more. It’s just like how programming language research goes beyond compilers research.
We actually launched a new class (CS 6422) that addresses exactly this and taught by Andy Pavlo’s first PhD student :) OMSCS db classes reviews are outdated IMO
I don't think watching the lectures is the hurdle that anyone at OMSCS is trying to jump. The program has a pretty low graduation rate, and the tests are known to be fairly difficult, which essentially requires the student to do work outside of class or go to the resources available through GT to understand the material. I can look up the highest quality lectures on any subject on YouTube, it doesn't mean I will understand any of it without the proper legwork.
FWIW I meant the diploma is identical, the actual experience will obviously vary. Some people will get better outcomes online, some will get better outcomes in person.
Is this a common thing to have at university? I'm from one of top universities in Poland; our database courses never included anything more than basic SQL where cursors were the absolute end. Even at Masters.
Do not worry, I do not work with databases in professional life as my main aspect. But I was not given a comprehensive education, and not even once there was a focus on anything more in depth. I came out without even knowing how databases work inside.
Naturally, I know what I could do - read a good book or go through open source projects, like Sqlite. But that knowledge was not was my uni gave me...
I am jealous of American/Canadian unis in this aspect.
OMSCS student here. You are absolutely right that the DB course is one of the weaker offerings. There is a newer Database System Implementation course, which is based on Andy Pavlo's excellent undergrad course (which is also available online), but only the first half or so of that course is covered, which is disappointing for a graduate course. In terms of the larger program, however, the two database courses are outliers and most courses are of much higher quality and definitely not undergrad level.
Hey — head TA of DSI here and want to correct some misconceptions.
DSI (6422) is taught by Andy Pavlo’s first PhD student who help to create the CMU course and a rather famous DB person. It is the same contents as the on-campus course (and were actually working to deepen/increase the depth of coverage). It’s designed to bridge between DB Theory and reading Postgres or MySql source code when it comes to DB designs and trade-offs — and covers topics like r-tries which I don’t think is covered elsewhere + a series of 12 seminal DB papers. As in any other grad-level class, you get out as much as you put in — and it’s super rare to have access to a DB researcher like Joy or hear his takes on DB development as a student at scale.
If anything, the feedback we’ve gotten from both on campus undergrad and MS students is that the OMSCS lectures + improvements are making their session more rigorous.
The DB course particularly sticks out. My undergrad's DB course was fathoms harder than this. This is what you'd expect a highschooler should be able to learn through a tutorial not a university course.
If it doesn't talk about systems calls like mmap, locking and the design of the buffer pool manager, it's not a university Database course it's a SQL and ER modelling tutorial.