His pace is fast, and it's hard to stay engaged. Miss a lecture or two, and you have to play catchup immediately. I think the curriculum is almost too packed with a huge breadth and a lot of depth within the breadth, so our attention is spread thin. However, Rosario is a really helpful guy who genuinely cares about teaching and helps his students. The projects have kinks that need to be ironed out (project 2B at one point blocked my teammate and I for 12 hours), but I feel like I learned the most practical knowledge taking this class out of any of my upper division CS courses. He's an industry guy (works/worked at Facebook, Amazon, Google) and I think we need more of that here at UCLA. He's polarizing among my classmates but I really gained a lot from taking the course with him.

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edit: heavy emphasis on polarizing.... some of the reviews on here act like he’s the worst, a 0/10. Simply not true. If you only focus on the bad and the BS about assignments/tests (which is semi-abundant), then I understand really disliking his teaching. But if you genuinely want to learn databases, you’re gonna learn very relevant stuff w Rosario. You’ll learn some not so relevant stuff too (what’s new in cs upper divs), but this class is a nice departure from the theory-only classes that are frequent here at UCLA. Though I will say that the lack of clarity and communication on projects was frustrating, and people are justifiably mad about it. If that can get fixed for the future, then this professor is the one to take.

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TL;DR: if you’re here to absorb as much practical knowledge as you can, and can stomach some BS and perhaps a B or lower for that, then Rosario is tailored for you. But if you aren’t and/or you want a relatively easy and simple upper-div (which is totally cool, I feel ya), you shouldn’t take him. Don’t believe the hype about how bad he is. He’s been one my favorite professors so far here at UCLA, but evidently not for a lot of other people lol.

This was a great experience. Don't let the past reviews from Spring 2019 scare you; Professor Rosario was extremely helpful and accommodating this quarter. He recorded all the in-person lectures and uploaded them to Youtube no more than a day after each class. His slides are well-written, informative and contain (almost) all of what you need to know to succeed in his class. Nothing like the reviews from 2019.

That being said though, don't come into Rosario's CS 143 thinking it'll be easy. Getting a B shouldn't be too difficult, but an A is quite challenging and requires lots of effort and patience. The exams are not at all easy as the average on the midterm was 69 and final 59. I felt like the tests were for the most part fair, though some questions on the final required a deep understanding of the material and some ingenuity. On the flip side, the homework is worth 40% of the final grade and graded very leniently, as some parts were graded for completion rather than accuracy.

Difficulty wise, this iteration of the class definitely seems harder than Spring 2020 or Spring 2021 since we're now back in-person, but definitely easier than Spring 2019. One piece of feedback I'd give for next year's class is to maybe add some harder homework problems that are more in line with the difficulty of the exams. I noticed that Rosario tended to include the easiest problems on his homework assignments, which probably led to a rude awakening for some students on the final.

This is one of the most useful classes at UCLA. I've interned at a few well-known tech companies, and having a strong understanding of databases, SQL, and transactions is super important. Professor Rosario centers this class around preparing you for industry, because he's worked at Facebook, Google, and Amazon and he knows what we need to succeed.

He is a genuinely helpful professor, who is always trying his best to help us learn and improve.

Professor is a very nice person, even there are quite a lot negative things you can say about this course by Rosario: 1. intensive course material, 2. hard test. I took this course with no awareness that it would be such intensive and hard almost like CS111: you have to read a lot about textbook chapter which is already an intensive workload(while eventhough it did not help a lot for the exam), each lecture slide is full of contents, really heavy, and the exam, especially final, can be said to be a nightmare if not well prepared, with even no one get an A- for the raw score.
That been said, these thing still don't negate the fact that Professor Rosario is a very nice person: he covered a lot in lecture because he did want us to learn a full image of database system, his giving hard exam seems not a real bad thing for me because it is an open book exam and indeed, after careful investment of effort you can get a really good grade for it. He tried to relieve us from too much consideration about letter grade, offering chances of enhancing the grade like replace the midterm grade with final one if you have done better in final, and even break his own originally designed grading rubric for homework to improve general grades for all. He really helped students a lot, especially in his office hour. He provide office hour almost every day during the week 10, and if you utilize them well, it will be really helpful.
He is tough and strict on rules in lecture and assignments, but it seems that he had his own ways to help students to learn without directly violate those rules. Pretty good man, if you see his last lecture slide with pages of them offering practical suggestions on both academy and industry.
Just a little post for RRR, whom I hated initially but respect at last, by all what he had done. Thanks professor:)

Took this class Spring2020 and it seemed like Rosario took a lot of feedback based on the previous negative reviews.

His tests were very fair and honestly on the easier side if you attended lecture and did the hw. He's very clear and has a good understanding of all the material so I made sure to attend all lectures.

He previously had large coding projects as a part of the class but this quarter instead chose to do smaller psets, which made the courseload very manageable.

He has good insights on the applications of databases due to his industry experience. Highly recommend you take this class with him

This course was pretty intense but overall I enjoyed it. Don't listen to the old reviews, they're not true anymore. Rosario is an amazing professor! He's the best CS professor I've had so far at UCLA. You can tell that he's truly passionate about his work and loves teaching students and helping them succeed. He's very helpful during office hours and works hard answering all our questions on Piazza. I've never had a professor respond so quickly to my Piazza posts.

Rosario is an amazing lecturer. Although there is a TON of content in this class and it can sometimes be dense, Rosario makes sure it's never boring. He cracks a lot of jokes and teaches in a very engaging way. I liked how lecture recordings were posted on YouTube after each lecture. Since there was so much content and Rosario goes through it at a rather quick pace (definitely doesn't speak sleep-inducingly slowly like Smallberg lol), I preferred to use the recordings rather than attend in-person so that I could take notes at my own pace. The slides were also pretty good. This class also has a textbook, but if you understand the lecture well, you don't have to read it since Rosario doesn't put things on his exams that were covered solely in the textbook and not in lecture.

There were 8 homeworks and four of them were graded on completion. The other ones were graded pretty leniently. Out of all the CS classes I've taken so far, this one definitely had the lightest assignment load. Even the most difficult and stressful one, homework/project 5, wasn't as bad as an average CS 32 assignment, and although it was challenging, it was still doable and it made me a better programmer. I also liked how we had 6 late days to use throughout the quarter.

Besides going through the lectures, the biggest time suck for this course for me was by far preparing for the exams. The other reviews are right in that the exams are insanely difficult, particularly the final. If you decide to take this class, you should definitely be prepared to set aside a lot of time to study for the exams; you will definitely not be able to get by with cramming. I did pretty bad on the midterm and the class average was 67, but fortunately Rosario values improvement, so you can improve your grade significantly by doing well on the final. I knew I'd have to do really well on the final to save my grade so I created an in-depth two-week study guide involving reviewing my notes, making flashcards, redoing hw, and doing practice problems from discussion section for each week of content. However, despite following my study plan to the T, I was still feeling terrified to take the final due to the many past reviews with horror stories about how hard it was. My fears certainly weren't unfounded, as the final exam was super difficult. No amount of studying could have prepared me for it. Despite being the final I had studied the most for at UCLA, I only got a C. The class average was 62.

However, here's the catch about the exams: they are curved very generously. Rosario curved my C on the final to an A, which let me end with an A in the class! I was so afraid my hard work would go to waste but thanks to the curve it did not. Many of my friends also said that the curve helped them a lot. Rosario even stated during the last lecture that he knows that we put a lot of effort into this class and that he tries to acknowledge that through his grading scheme.

So seriously, don't let the difficult exams or past reviews deter you from taking this class! You'll learn so much important info that will help you greatly in your CS career taught by a quadruple-Bruin seasoned industry professional who is clearly very passionate about student success. Although you may go through difficulties, they will make you a better student and programmer. This is not a class you want to miss out on and you should take it even if it's not required for your major. I promise, give it a try if you get the chance, you won't regret it ❤️

Edit: In case that wasn't enough convincing for you, I just received an internship offer all thanks to this class!!! After getting my grade back, I sent a follow-up email for a data science position saying I had just finished the course and explaining what I'd learned. That caught the company's interest, as despite ghosting me earlier and ignoring my previous follow-ups, they finally agreed to do a follow-up interview and gave me the offer! Seriously, you need to take this class, it will open doors for you!

Rosario is one of the most entertaining and laidback professors I’ve had in the CS department. Lectures will never bore you, as he cracks jokes or tells stories to break up heavy topics. Assignments were fun to do, and were somewhat comparable to the difficulty of the midterm. The final was tough; we were given new languages and some new scenarios and were meant to use intuition to solve those problems. However, the final was graded pretty generously.

Grading is extremely generous. This quarter, it was 40% HW, 25% MT, and 35% Final. HW was graded on a straight scale, while exams were curved. Rosario was very clear with what he considered to be an A-, B-, C on the midterm.

Overall, the practical content of the course and the perspective of learning from a hip, industry veteran made this class a fun time. Don’t miss out on this hidden gem of a class.

The reviews from 2019 and later quarters all ring true to some extent. Professor Rosario is a good lecturer who tries his best to help students, but his exams are hard as balls: the types of questions he asks are similar to Eggert's, but graded with little to no partial credit given. Had Cho not been on sabbatical, I don't think I would have taken his class, his exams are just too much...

There are some harsh reviews for Professor Rosario here on Bruinwalk. This is more than a little bit surprising to me, as I had an excellent experience taking 143 with him over the summer. Professor Rosario was an engaging lecturer, answered questions well, and was very helpful during office hours. There are several mentions of bullying/micro-aggressions among the other reviews, and given that they are from the same quarter during which I took the class, I must have missed them. All I can testify is that he was friendly and helpful during lectures and office hours and never gave any indications of being rude or dismissive with me that I could pick up on. I felt that the workload was on the easier end for the computer science department, although Eggert has skewed my perspective on normality, and the final was based off of the class (not an accomplishment, but then again we deal with some silly stuff here) and didn't jump out as being particularly unreasonable. It wasn't necessarily the best class I've ever taken but it didn't stand out as a negative experience. I'm only adding my review so that people know that the narrative that Rosario is an asshole is not a universal experience and perhaps should be taken with a grain of salt.