Database Systems

CS 353 teaches you to think about data the way a database engine does: how to model a domain as relations, query it declaratively with SQL, and trust that the system will give you correct answers under concurrent access without losing your writes. Most of the semester is split between writing increasingly nontrivial SQL, reasoning about normalization and physical layout (indexes, joins, query plans), and building a real relational application as a term project, with a homework stream keeping the theory honest. It sits on top of your data structures background and feeds directly into anything backend, data-intensive, or systems-flavored you do later, basically every real software job assumes you know this material.