Monday, Wednesday; 12:20 - 1:35 Murphey 116

Office Hours: See Schedule

Course syllabus (PDF)

Canvas | Gradescope

This is the official course page for COMP 421: Files and Databases. This semester (Fall 2025) marks a new direction for the course compared to previous versions, with a new emphasis on database systems rather than applications and data modeling. To kickstart this change, the course is forked from CMU’s Intro to Database Systems. As such, projects will be done using a fork of the Bustub DBMS and some examples in lecture slides will reference the Wu-Tang Clan. See the links above for a tentative course schedule, project information, syllabus etc. All this is subject to change, so check back for updates.

There will undoubtedly be some growing pains as we transition to this new course, so thank you in advance for working with the instructors and TAs to help with this change. We want to hear your (constructive) feedback about how this process is going, and what we can do to make the experience better.

Finally, a big thanks to Andy Pavlo and others at CMU for open sourcing the materials this course is based on. As this course grows at UNC, we hope to contribute back to this effort for open source course materials based on our experience.