I took this class in the online format in Spring of 2020. I learned a lot in this class, Professor Rosario makes the content interesting and is very helpful during office hours and on CCLE. On CCLE, he will give extremely clear answers which was really helpful especially due to the online format of the course. During office hours, he is approachable, and I was able to get clarification on some of the harder homework problems.
In addition, towards the end, he covers some topics that are not required by the curriculum but are very interesting and useful. He also gives advice on his experiences from industry etc in the last class which was awesome to hear especially since he is a UCLA alum.
Exams are challenging, and reflect lecture and homework content. The homeworks were reasonable although they usually had a couple of difficult questions that usually took a little more time.
I highly recommend Rosario for CS143!

After his first quarter of teaching he had good reviews; overall he was sitting at around 3.8 or a 4+ or something in that range. *He looked good*. Hence why so many people eagerly signed up to this class. It takes a lot to drop from such high reviews to such low reviews.

He angered a lot of students. Not just some of them. Practically everyone in Spring 2019 had a bad experience in his class. I could go on and on about this, but I don't need to. Just read these other reviews if you want an idea of this monstrosity.

I can't speak for previous quarters, but for spring online remote instruction he was one of my most considerate professors when it came to students needs. There were a couple of homework assignments (no projects) but none were particularly time consuming and he was quick to clarify and answer questions. It also seems he downsized the number of slides from previous quarters, so referencing the slides/handouts made the questions pretty direct. I felt that attending lecture (or watching lecture recordings) was still essential as he more clearly explains and annotates the slides in class. The final was a whole lot longer than the midterm but he went over what topics would appear on it so I didn't find any questions to be unfair.

Despite expecting a bad experience from all the previous reviews, I think Rosario took a lot of the student complaints from previous quarters and made a bunch of improvements and it shows. Overall, I feel like I learned a lot and was able to enjoy his class without having to stress about my grade.

Honestly I do not know why Prof Rosario has such bad reviews. I will say that at times his lectures were a bit unclear (specifically a few topics like B+ trees) and he uses very specific phrasing/wording sometimes that you must know or else you could lose credit but his slides are helpful/easy to read. His class is recorded and you can reference the slides as well. For a CS class, I felt the homework was light and helped you prepare for exams. The coding projects were quite enjoyable in my opinion and not overwhelming. The exams were extremely challenging (the first one was okay but the grading was a bit brutal (i.e. very little partial credit) and the second one was probably the hardest exam I have ever taken and was super long), but the curve was so generous that it didn't matter. I performed below average on both exams (and failed both), did well on homework, and ended up with an A- so the curving must have been very generous. Rosario has even mentioned that you would have to try to fail his class, so at the very least if you put forth effort, you will pass the class. I think you learn very useful/applicable knowledge in this class and the lectures were fairly interesting to me and he would add in a joke here and there which was nice. I didn't do the readings and he doesn't require attendance. He is also friendly if you go to his office hours. I would take this class again!

This professor was great this quarter. I came into this class just hoping to learn SQL, but ended up learning a lot about a lot of different databases in a good amount of detail.
He isn't condescending or rude in the slightest, patiently answers everyones questions (though he does ask people to see him after class if the class is being held up too much) and is honestly kind of funny.
The projects were also well designed and extremely reasonable. Overall, I definitely recommend this class.

Now that the final lecture is done, I just want to tell everyone that Rosario is amazing and you really really shouldn't be afraid of the old reviews.

This professor definitely has changed from the previous quarters, I'm not feeling anything negative mentioned in the previous reviews in his class.

There's a highly vocal group of anonymous students here who are downvoting any sort of positive feedback because they are upset about the difficulty of the final and/or their grade in the course. Notice that most of the negative reviews were written June 20-23ish, 2019, which is around the time that final exam grades and letter grades for the class were released. Don't always trust the upvotes/downvotes on each review. I'll offer a change by focusing on positive aspects, which is something I believe everyone should do rather than unleashing their hate just because they have a platform that makes them anonymous.
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First, our Piazza forum had almost 900 posts, but the professor basically answered all of them. Yup, some students received unenlightening replies or were instructed to go to office hours when they asked about things that were discussed repeatedly in lecture, but most students who politely asked reasonable questions got helpful answers -- within MINUTES -- from the professor himself. If a professor did not care about his students, would he answer practically all of the students' concerns within 1-10 minutes when he could just assign the task to the TAs like other "oh so caring" or in other words "gives lots of A's" professors do? Do other professors stay up until midnight the day before the 8am final exam to answer all last-minute questions from students, like this professor does?
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Second, the professor is actually really nice and friendly in person. During the break and after class, I've seen students approach him and ask a few questions, and the professor would typically respond with a friendly smile and often laugh lightheartedly. If good questions came up during the break, he would announce them and clarify things to the entire class as soon as the class resumed. He also held extra office hours during Weeks 2-10 upon requests from students, and he held extra office hours during Finals Week that spanned several hours as well.
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Third, his projects were pretty interesting and sometimes fun although they were difficult. They were much more practical than other professors' projects, some of which were last updated a decade ago. He also gave extra credit on the projects, and they weren't too difficult as long as you planned ahead.
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Fourth, the professor is truly loyal to UCLA and gave several inspirational pep talks throughout the quarter. He mentioned how he did horribly in some classes here at UCLA but that it did not affect his professional career. He name-dropped several prestigious jobs he held and companies he worked for in the past to illustrate that grades don't dictate our future.
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All of my friends like this professor, and so does a good chunk of the class, which is evident because a lot of students continued to go to lecture even though it was at 8am. Students often laughed at the professor's memes and jokes, and generally had feel-good vibes as the class came to a close. We applauded the professor not once but twice at the end of the last lecture to express our appreciation. The emotional, vocal minority here on Bruinwalk does not reflect all 200+ students in the class. However, I do understand these students' struggles because this class definitely pushed us hard in terms of assignment workload, exam difficulty, and denseness of class material. Let's just remember to be nice to others even when we're anonymous so that we can collectively strengthen our community, do good things out there, and be regarded with greater respect from those outside the Bruin family.

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.