The recent reviews don't lie; the class, and professor rosario, have improved since a majority of the reviews were left. I took it online and we had 5 homeworks, 1 extra credit project with spark, a midterm, and a final. All of which were pretty straightforward, and the curve prof rosario gives is pretty generous. Additionally, I never felt like prof rosario was belittling students like some previous reviewers mentioned; I asked some pretty dumb questions in office hours and class, and never once did prof rosario make me feel like an idiot (even though I probably am at times). I'm not too interested in databases, but I'd recommend most CS majors to take some offering of this course to get a fundamental understanding of databases.

He sucks and I hate him a lot

Rosario has really chilled out since last year. He was a friendly and helpful instructor during Spring 2020. The homework assignments were really doable, and the tests weren't insane.

For the first 10 weeks I really wanted to give a good comment for this professor, because his average response time on Piazza is 40 mins and he is always willing to support students (he gives us an extra 1 hours to do midterm), and his (kinda) engaging lectures. His homework (which is 40% of the grade) is generally not hard, except for the last one or two, and he gives extra credit for the one mini-project.
However, things changed. You wouldn't expect the final would be much much harder than the midterm. In midterm, we have many SQL related problem which is clearly defined in class or in textbook (or slides). Well, in the final, even though we have 24 hours to work on it, many friends of mine and me have to work at least 10 hours for a supposed 3 hours exam (he told us this exam was written for 3 hours). There are a bunch of explanation kind of questions that you can't really find the related information in the textbook (or slides or lectures), and even the textbook doesn't go in detail for those concepts. So, you have to really really think out of the box, and like use what you have learned from the past 20 years maybe, to compose an answer, not to mention that he gives few partial credit for answer that is not in his solution. Putting it simply, it's not just testing what you learn in class, it's like asking you to publish a paper for some of the questions. THIS IS INSANE.
All in all, it's not the kind of easy-A CS elective class you are looking (maybe not even easy-B). However, if you really like database systems, the lectures are good (JUST DON'T TAKE THE EXAM). So if you have other choices of professor teaching this class, go for it.

I remember seeing Rosario get a lot of from prior Bruinwalk reviews and actively tried avoiding him - then I took his class and realized how WRONG those reviews were. He's completely revamped the curriculum post 2019 and it's solid.

Rosario is awesome. His lectures are clear + engaging and follow the slides in lock step (he posts slides prior to lecture, annotates during class, and re-posts after).

Best thing about him is he works in industry as a Data Scientist / SWE, so every topic is covered with practical, real-world examples that we can actually use.

And he's a nice guy who truly enjoys teaching, and he handled COVID better than any other professor I've seen so props!

The professor was really nice and helpful. He answered Piazza posts extremely quickly and thoughtfully.

We had a mini-project for extra credit. This probably bumped my grade up from B+ territory up to an A.

I'm not sure how good his lectures are, since I just looked over the slides, but from the brief snippets of the recording I saw, they seemed okay. His slides, however, are very good, IMO.

There were only 5 homework assignments, and the workload for each of these was not too bad. I think each of these assignments could be done in an afternoon.

The midterm was okay, but the final was a bit harder. I just reviewed the lecture slides, homework assignments, and discussion slides. I received a 88% for the midterm and 80% for the final.

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).

TLDR: Rosario tests are always pretty hard and detailed, but he curves generously and the workload is manageable.

I agree with most other reviews that the class was pretty chaotic, but it's mainly because it was the first time in 3 years it had been offered and the professor said from the start it would be a "pilot". The workload is super manageable, 4 projects, a midterm, and a final. The midterm is only 15% and it was advertised as a quiz (unfortunately :() but it was a true midterm that requires a fair amount of understanding of everything covered in lecture. I expect our average to be a lot higher on the final given that people likely studied a lot more. If you do take this class, just be aware that Rosario is not very flexible with regrades UNLESS the graders themselves made a mistake. So make sure you follow the specs to a T and ask for clarifications if you aren't sure about something. I actually liked Rosario, I feel like he really cares about his students and he's willing to help you learn if you show him that you are putting in the effort. Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I found him quite funny, a bit sarcastic, but overall a clear lecturer.

prof loves to include trivia on exams, which was true in 143 and still true now (idk what i expected). projects are very, very easy (i have no experience in web dev) but the spec instructions are very unclear and he gets pretty upset if u ask clarifying questions on campuswire (i did not bother, because i took 143 with him and therefore expected this). final scores are not out yet so who knows what my grade is but i don't think it's hard to do well in this class in general, so long as ur willing to tolerate incredibly stupid questions that do not actually test your understanding of underlying principles. the first cs prof ive ever had who lectures on history and expects u to remember names. My god. Are we in middle school. again it's really not tough to remember this but it does make u question the value of ur own time. In my one wild and precious life i'm making sure i wrote down 1996: Opera released in case rosario pulls that one out next

Just save your sanity by not taking this class. He gives out basically an encyclopedia of material and everything is fair game. During lectures he speaks faster than Ben Shapiro and taking any kind of valuable notes impossible. Exams are a coin flip since questions are based on maybe one word he said about a topic in class. Taking a random Udemy class will teach you way more about Web Applications and Web Development than this whole class.