FAQ

The Spring 2025 offering of this course will be taught at Carnegie Mellon's Pittsburgh campus. The lectures will be taught in person and all students are expected to attend unless there is extenuating circumstances.

Our capacity in the course is limited to the number of TAs that we have and the room size. We will move students off of the wait list as new seats become available. Preferential consideration is given to SCS students. Switching between sections will not improve your chances of getting into the class. Please do not contact the instructors or the TAs about whether you have a chance of enrolling into the course. You will be contacted if you are enrolled in the class.

No, there are no scheduled recitations. There are only lectures. We will add additional help sessions for the projects during semester.

Yes, you should be familiar with programming and debugging in C++. All the course projects are on the BusTub system written in C++17. There will be a mandatory project to evaluate your C++ proficiency at the beginning of the semester. We will not teach you C++ during the semester. If you are unsure about your C++ programming skills, then please prepare accordingly. You can also to refer to our C++ Bootcamp for additional materials.

Yes! Intro to Database Systems (15-445/645) will be taught every semester. The companion Advanced Database Systems (15-721) course will also be taught most semesters going forward. See the CMU-DB Course page for additional information.

If you are a CMU student during the semester, then post your questions to the Piazza message board. If you are not a CMU student, there is an Discord channel to meet other students. Note: This Discord channel is not affiliated with CMU and will not be monitored by instructors or TAs.
⚠ Do not post questions about the project as GitHub issues.