Welcome to the Wiki of the course "Databases and Information Systems" in the winter semester 2025/2026
Information about the exam on Tuesday, 17th March 2026
Results of the official evaluation of this course
The course is given by Prof. Dr. Hannah Bast and assisted by Robin Textor-Falconi.
It takes place every Tuesday from 14:05 - 15:55 h in the seminar room 101-1-9/13 and on Zoom (meeting link, meeting ID: 622 3637 6628, passcode: DBISWS2526). The first lecture is on Tuesday 14.10.2025 and the last lecture is on Tuesday 03.02.2026. There will be no lectures on the Tuesday 04.11.2025 and on the three Tuesdays 23.12.2025, 30.12.2025 and 06.01.2026 (Christmas break). In total there will be 13 lectures.
The tutors for this course are Patrick Brosi, Johannes Kalmbach, Sebastian Walter and Christoph Ullinger. The administrator of the supporting systems (Daphne, SVN, Forum) is Axel Lehmann.
Important Links
Our course management system Daphne (login with your RZ user name and password).
The forum for announcements and questions.
The manual for how to ask questions on the forum.
Our rules for the exercise sheets. Please read them carefully, completely and before you start working on the exercises. They are valid for all exercise sheets of this course.
Information about Subversion (SVN) can be found here (in German) and here (in English); about some editors (including Vim) here (in German).
The courses from previous semesters: Information Retrieval WS 23/24, Information Retrieval WS 22/23, Information Retrieval WS 21/22, Information Retrieval WS 19/20, Information Retrieval WS 18/19, Information Retrieval WS 17/18, Information Retrieval WS 16/17, Information Retrieval WS 15/16, Information Retrieval WS 13/14, Information Retrieval WS 12/13.
The exams from previous semesters: WS 23/24, WS 22/23, WS 21/22, WS 19/20, WS 18/19, WS 17/18, WS 16/17, WS 15/16, WS 13/14, WS 12/13.
Here you find a list of the Python packages you should have installed in your environment. Alternatively you can download and use our Linux Image (for Virtualbox or VMWare) which already contains all packages.
A PyTorch cheatsheet can be found here. An overview over basic tensor usage within PyTorch can be found here. If you are already familiar with NumPy you can find information about how NumPy operations translate to PyTorch operations here.
Here you can find a link to a video tutorial about how to work on the exercise sheets with our course system Daphne and SVN.
Lecture Slides, Video Recordings, Exercise Sheets, and Code
For visitors from outside the University of Freiburg: You can freely access all the course materials below, except the solutions.
Lecture 1, Tuesday, October 14, 2025 (Introduction, Inverted Index, Zipf's law):
Video recording (MP4 Download), Slides, Exercise Sheet 01, Code from the lecture, Code template for ES01, Dataset for ES1, Solution for ES1
Lecture 2, Tuesday, October 21, 2025 (Ranking and Evaluation):
Video recording (MP4 Download), Slides, Exercise Sheet 02, Code template for ES02, Table to enter your benchmark results, Training Benchmark, Testing Benchmark, Solution for ES2
Lecture 3, Tuesday, October 28, 2025 (Database Basics):
Video recording (MP4 Download), Slides, Exercise Sheet 03, Code template for ES03, Solution for ES3
Lecture 4, Tuesday, November 11, 2025 (Query Planning Basics):
Video recording (MP4 Download), Slides, Exercise Sheet 04, Code template for ES04, TSV files (.tar.gz), Table to enter your query results, Solution for ES4
Lecture 5, Tuesday, November 18, 2025 (Joins and more SQL):
Video recording (MP4 Download), Slides, Exercise Sheet 05, Code template for ES05, Solution for ES5
Lecture 6, Tuesday, November 25, 2025 (Indexing, Query Optimization, ACID):
Video recording (MP4 Download), Slides, Exercise Sheet 06, Code from the lecture, Code template for ES06, Solution for ES6
Lecture 7, Tuesday, December 2, 2025 (Knowledge Graphs, SPARQL, SPARQL to SQL):
Video recording (MP4 Download), Slides, Exercise Sheet 07, Code from the lecture, Code template for ES07, wikidata-simple.tsv, wikidata-complex.tsv, Solution for ES7
Lecture 8, Tuesday, December 9, 2025 (Fuzzy Search, Prefix Edit Dist, Q-Gram Index):
Video recording (MP4 Download), Slides, Exercise Sheet 08, Code from the lecture, Code template for ES08, wikidata-entities.tsv, wikidata-entities.100k.tsv, Table to enter your benchmark results, Solution for ES8
Lecture 9, Tuesday, December 16, 2025 (Web Applications 1):
Video recording (MP4 Download) Slides, Exercise Sheet 09, Code from the lecture, Code template for ES09, wikidata-properties.tsv, Solution for ES9
Lecture 10, Tuesday, January 13, 2026 (Web Applications 2):
Video recording (MP4 Download) Slides, Exercise Sheet 10, Code from the lecture, Code template for ES10, Solution for ES10
Lecture 11, Tuesday, January 20, 2026 (Vector Space Model, Word embeddings):
Video recording (MP4 Download), Slides, Exercise Sheet 11, Code from the lecture, Code template for ES11, movies-plots.tsv. embeddings.fasttext.pt, embeddings.random.pt, Solution for ES11
Lecture 12, Tuesday, January 27, 2026 (N-gram Models, LLMs, RAG):
Video recording (MP4 Download), Slides, Exercise Sheet 12, Code from the lecture, Code template for ES12, lecture-subtitles.tar.gz, Solution for ES12
Lecture 13, Tuesday, February 3, 2026 (Evaluation, Exam, Work in our Group):
Video recording (MP4 Download), Slides
