I have heard that the Berkeley graduate curriculum no longer follows this book. What is the story there?
Traditionally, Berkeley had graduate-level reading/project courses in both Operating Systems (CS262) and Databases (CS286). Through editions 1-3, Readings in Database Systems reflected the CS286 database course at Berkeley. During that period, a large fraction of the students took graduate OS, and a more select group took Databases. In 1999, Eric Brewer and I tried an experiment where we merged the curricula of these two courses into a single course offering, spread over two semesters. The idea was to provide students (and the instructors!) a more holistic view of software systems by looking at core issues through the lens of two different communities. We alternated giving lectures, attending each other’s lectures and heckling from the audience to highlight the differences in worldview between OS and DB researchers. This role-playing stimulated good student discussion and shed light on a larger computer systems design space than is traditionally considered by either community. The newl
