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.

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

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:)

I agree with just about everything else that's been said so far. Here's an example.

One lecture we were discussing how to run transactions serially. The professor mentioned that you can use a topological sort on a precedence graph to obtain the correct order of transactions. He then proceeded to give an incorrect explanation of topological sort. When a student pointed this out, instead of humbly accepting his mistake, Rosario snapped at the student and in a flustered tone, told us to just do a topological sort.

A student watching this all unfold might be thinking that since CS 180 is not a pre-req for CS 143 and since our professor doesn't even know what a topological sort is, this topic will probably never show up again.

Well, on our final, topological sort reappeared even though it had never been discussed again. I guess we were just expected to learn it on our own from one refrenece to it in lecture.

Experiences like this are what make the class so frustrating.

The funniest part about this professor is when a student pointed out his mistakes on the slide, he explained that he was not the person who made the ppt. When he could not explain himself, he would say there are some different implementations. Also, every time he said this won't be on the test, do NOT trust him. If you have to take this class with this professor, god bless you.

Honestly this is a pretty typical CS elective. We go over a good amount of material, and it’s not always taught the best but you still end up learning at least a few useful things. It’s nice that Rosario makes some kind of effort to keep the class modern: he completely rewrote our first project to use Python and Postgres instead of PHP and MySQL, and while I didn’t find our second project very interesting, we still got good exposure to some pretty important tech for data science. They could’ve been better (especially project 2, which had a good amount of probably unnecessary hiccups). The homework’s are kind of bad, they’re kind of too wordy and not clear, but thankfully it’s all graded on completion, and you’ll still get something out of them at least.

For his lectures there’s definitely a whole lot of content. It’s a bit better if you actually go to class since he kind of breezes over some of the stuff that he realizes he won’t have time to cover. It’s definitely and can be hard to focus for an 8am, but usually after asking a few questions I was able to come out of lecture understanding most of the stuff. A lot of the topics did have me dozing off, but databases isn’t the most interesting topic in general. I liked how he kept his material modern, even if he didn’t cover NoSQL stuff very well it’s still good to hear it mentioned, and he also had some nice materials on streams and distributed big data type stuff.

Lastly, I’m not sure what’s up with the overwhelmingly negative reviews? I’ve never actually talked to anyone who hates this class as much as these people seem to do. Additionally there’s a lot of really strange personal attacks on a guy that clearly means well but just isn’t a great teacher. And it seems that all those same people are downvoting any reviews that are positive in any way (I’m sure they’ll come for this one too!). Really just seems like one friend group who for some reason felt personally wronged by the professor. The class isn’t great but it’s overall fine, and the stuff you learn is really valuable, especially if you’ve never had exposure to it before. I recommend it especially cuz it doesn’t seem like 143 has any other good professors anymore.

I started out the quarter really looking forward to what Professor Rosario had in store for CS 143 because of his modern approach and industry experience, but ended up disliking him and my life while taking this class.

Projects:

Credit to him here, the projects are practical and interesting. The 2nd project is fairly vague but doable if you start early.

Tests:

He wanted to be like Eggert but honestly he couldn't. Eggert at least gives somewhat fair tests, Rosario's tests were the biggest load of BS. Especially the final, a huge test where he handpicked the most random stuff out of his lecture slides and made it a large portion of the test. The final was the one of the hardest tests I've taken here at UCLA and it felt like he made the test unnecessarily hard.

Piazza:

He seems like an okay guy in person, but he can be seriously mean to students asking FAIR questions online. I wasn't even a victim of this but monitored Piazza frequently and it felt like he was going on some weird power trip.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend him for 143, it's not the worth the stress and the hassle. This is the first time I've felt compelled enough to write a BruinWalk review about a professor. He's clearly a smart guy but out to get students to fail his tests.

Professor was honestly the worst I've had in UCLA. This is not supposed to be a hard CS class, it was supposed to be a useful CS elective. BUT HOLY COW THE FINAL WAS MOST DUMB TEST IVE EVER TAKEN. GDI i feel like I learned nothing, but I use all the stuff I learned in the class at work (and I know what I'm doing). The test did not test my understanding of the material at all, it was a test to see who can regurgitate most bs possible. DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS. (honestly you can learn postgres, relational algebra, and stream by yourself with youtube WAY BETTERTHAN ROSARIO).

Very very helpful class and material. CS143 + CS144 pretty much covers the basics for full stack software engineering. The biggest pro of Rosario's classes is that it is packed with information, so you can learn a lot from him. He is able to convey his ideas clearly, but I think one potential problem is that some examples in his slides could cause confusion for a beginner, but he might not be aware of it (as someone who already understands the knowledge). This requires a little more effort from you to understand and do some minor research, but I would say it's definitely worth it considering the amount of knowledge you will gain.
Regarding previous comments, I agree that Rosario has a problematic personality. In particular, his biggest problem is his pride / ego; apart from that, he appears to be mostly rational. Nevertheless, I don't see why this should affect the rating of his course. His primary job as a professor is to pass on the knowledge, and the primary job of me as a student is to receive this knowledge; and I think he has done a well-above-average job in doing so. In terms of personality, Rosario has his own journey that he should work on, so is everyone. I don't see why we should be concerned for him.