I disagree with a lot of the negative reviews of Rosario and his class. I found his lectures to be pretty engaging and covered the material pretty well. He was also pretty open to helping students.

Content and exams: The lectures in the first half of the course (mainly SQL and relational algebra) covered everything you really need to know and the midterm was very fair in my opinion. The second half of the class was definitely a turning point where the concepts got more difficult (NoSQL, join algorithms, system design, etc.) and the lectures were more congested. The final was extremely difficult and too long in my opinion, but as long as you did well in the rest of the class you should have been fine. Overall, I feel I learned what I needed to without being too overwhelmed. (Another note, he uses a lot of the questions from previous midterms. He does not give back the final though).

Homework: There were 6, all of which were relatively easy and not super intensive. Covered the most relevant material too.

Textbook: Rosario gives a textbook as a basis for the class, though it is not necessarily needed. I would recommend reading it though as it is pretty good at explaining the concepts and fills in the blanks Rosario might have missed.

Overall, don't be scared off by the bad reviews. The class is worth taking and gives you the fundamental understanding of databases you need, just be prepared for some difficult exams.

One of my favorite courses I have taken at UCLA. Prof. Rosario really knows his stuff. I thought the assignments were extremely fair and the exams in lecture felt representative of what was displayed on exams. Some of the exam questions proved to be quite tricky but Prof. Rosario's expectations seem to reflect that students are learning and is willing to fairly represent the grades. Felt like I learned a lot about data management systems not only just hands on content but also some theory and internals for how data management systems work. Would highly recommend this class for all computer scientists.

Rosario is an extremely arrogant cunt. He's an okay lecture and the first half of the class is alright but that's where the positives end. The second half of the class is extremely material dense where you are jumping from topics every lecture. Slides are very long. Rosario is also extremely unhelpful - he refuses any regrade requests and constantly berates and talks down on students. He's also just rly arrogant in general - he likes boasting about his vacations in Hawaii and mountain biking hobby and how expensive it is in his exam questions. Doesn't help that the midterms and final are difficult af. Don't take this class lmao.

I gotta say. Whatever criticisms Rosario previously got definitely wasn’t an issue this quarter.
I found the material (especially in the first half with SQL and Relational Algebra) really interesting and applicable. Same with the NoSQL stuff later.
While I didn’t find the more theoretical aspects as interesting, I still learned about its importance. I was a surprised at the different topics we covered.
My only complaint about the lectures — they’re too dense. Now it probably doesn’t help that we had to cancel a lecture due to the wildfires, but I found them to be extremely fast. I could barely keep up during the live lecture and I had to rewind the lecture about BCNF sooo many times that it probably took me double the time — and I consider myself a pretty fast note-taker. Other than that, he's a good speaker and gets the information out in a clear way as long as he isn't rushing.
As for the homeworks. I really enjoyed them. They tied in the lectures really well and they definitely helped with the exams.
As for the exams, I found it mostly fine, except for some ambiguity regarding some of the questions. The final was much harder and there were some problems that I wish he'd spend more time on lecturing it.
As for his helpfulnesss on piazza, there was this one time where he just wrote “Does your code resemble a proper python file” 3 different times. I feel like there was a better way to address that students’ questions but oh well…

Leaving my first review on here as I feel strongly about helping prospective students decide if this specific class is right for them. TLDR: if grades don't matter to you, this is a class covering really relevant topics for industry and applications; if grades are a concern, I would not recommend this class due to (1) amount of content (2) the professor (3) the midterm and final

[1] Course Content: the class is split into SQL / RDBMS for the first 4 weeks and more technical concepts (indexing, architecture, NoSQL) for the latter half. He does a great job explaining the first half and teaching SQL, but the second half of the class is very confusing (subtopics are organized all over the place, 100 slides per lecture, no clear context). Amount of content is equivalent to CS 131 (a lot) and I would recommend taking CS 111 before taking this. Otherwise, all the actual TOPICS covered are very relevant and useful in applications and industry, which is why I would recommend taking it if you are purely interested in learning and not the grades.

[2] The midterm was difficult, with a class average of 68%. Rosario's tests are very detail oriented, there were MC questions asking you to recall a sentence he mentioned in lecture or a topic minimally explained in a single slide, so take detailed notes.

[3] The final, in my opinion, was just disrespectful. It was 3 hours between 6:30pm and 9:30pm, and he made the questions extraneous and incredibly convoluted. Explanations take up a page. It was very frustrating as half of the questions did not test understanding or knowledge (nor even through application), but rather it seemed he makes it unnecessarily hard for no reason. The questions derail you from actually applying what you learned. He also includes little notes or comments that waste your time and it overall felt very sarcastic, vain, and designed poorly. There obviously is a curve but this just demonstrates a lack of character and respect for students.

If you care about learning about databases and relevant topics surrounding that for your job, and you are not worried about the professor or final, then take it. Otherwise, if you have better options, I would highly recommend not wasting your time with Rosario!

unbelievable final exam

This is such a useful class but Rosario is genuinely one of the worst, most rude lecturers I've ever had. He's a good lecturer up until you ask him a question, in which he feels like his intelligence is being insulted. He is passive-aggressive at best if you ask him questions, and he is super adamant on little stuff. For example, he will pretty much deny any regrade request you make. On one of the homeworks, we we were told to create a SQL query and filter on a specific value and many people (myself included) did not check for the value's NULLity (because the comparison >, <, etc. operators implicitly check it), but he was so adamant on not giving credit to people who didn't include the NULLity check. He's just really annoying in my opinion, but it's a super useful class. Midterm was decently difficult, we'll see how final goes

Reading through his slides every class, expecting us to learn difficult techs by only giving us a few examples, he's absolutely the worst instructor I've ever seen. By the way, he also give 26% of the class F in the final exam.

Reading through his slides every class, expecting us to learn difficult techs by only giving us a few examples, he's absolutely the worst instructor I've ever seen. By the way, he also give 26% of the class F in the final exam.

Reading through his slides every class, expecting us to learn difficult techs by only giving us a few examples, he's absolutely the worst instructor I've ever seen. By the way, he also give 26% of the class F in the final exam.