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.

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:)

Course Material: very dense, some useful, some a waste of time. This course covers so many different topics at a hastened pace. His lectures are powerpoint based; each are ~100 slides and each slide is pretty dense in content. In addition, you also need to read the textbook for certain chapters, which is also pretty dense. Much of what he covers is useful and practical, but he also covers some obscure and unimportant stuff. Try your best not to skip lecture if you can, or else you can fall behind pretty quickly.

Projects: time-consuming but otherwise reasonable and practical. There are 2 partner projects, each divided into an "A" and "B" part; i.e. (1A, 1B, 2A, 2B). Part A of each project is easy and are really warm-ups for the "real" work that constitutes part B. Part B comprises the majority of the time and work for each project. You are given 2 late-day passes (i.e. you could submit 2 days late without penalty) for each project, and there is no other late policy. I advise to start as early as possible on the projects (particularly the Part B's) and to use late passes on the Part B's.

Exams: I found the midterm reasonable and the final a bit challenging/unreasonable, in part because of the sheer amount of material covered in this course. Anything in lecture, even seemingly unimportant and obscure topics, are fair game for the exams. As of this post, midterm average 66%, final average TBD.

Homework Assignments: reasonable and graded mostly on completion. There are five homework assignments, and he drops the lowest homework score.

Also, if your Final Exam "letter grade equivalent" is higher than your midterm "letter grade equivalent", he replaces your midterm grade. Likewise, if your Final Exam "letter grade equivalent" is higher than what would be your final grade, then your Final Exam grade becomes your final grade.

Overall, I found this class to be challenging compared to other CS electives, in part because the course is very material-dense. I did find the exams (the final in particular) to be unreasonable, and I do agree with the sentiments of other reviewers in this regard. However, the professor does seem to have good intentions, by introducing more practical and useful applications in this course and by trying to grade as fairly and consistently as possible.

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.