The next decade of the database course: three decades speak to the next

Last year at SIGCSE'99, for the first time in recent memory, a Birds-of-Feather (BOF) session for Database educators was held. As some attendees noted, there had not been a Database education paper accepted for that or the previous SIGCSE meetings, although there had been three @@@@ 1997 [12]. From about two dozen educators, “meta-data” or data about many aspects of their courses were discovered. Few had paid any attention to ACM/IEEE's curriculum '91 when designing their courses to fit late-century students' needs. This expository paper examines, first, what was the state of the Database course near the end of the 20^th century, as background to a discussion of what should or will be the near-term future of the (first, undergraduate) Database course. From data gathered mostly at the BOF and some later by email, we found the following “state of the course,” 1998-99.