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Ohio State's school year is divided into four quarters, each ten weeks long. It is possible to schedule classes to meet three, four, or five hours per week. (The latter with 50 class meetings is similar to a three semester hour course.) Most students attend classes for three of the four quarters. Because the amount of material covered in a programming class is proportional to the number and quality of programs completed, we have chosen a two quarter sequence, each course meeting three days a week. The students receive four quarter hours credit (one hour of laboratory credit) for each course. The students in this sequence are mostly computer and information science majors, but there are also many mathematics and some science and engineering majors. There are other courses for administrative science, engineering and other non-technical students. All the introductory courses are taught by graduate students under the supervision of a faculty member.

Data base systems are intended to help in the storage and retrieval of information which is needed to make decisions in an organization. Senko [7] has stated that we should try to assure "(1) the efficient use of human resources in the design, implementation, and utilization of information systems, and (2) the efficient utilization of the physical mechanical resources of the systems themselves."

This session contains three papers dealing with optimization of data base systems. Two of them treat improvement of performance by wisely choosing storage structures or processing options. The third paper discusses automatic translation between data structures to obtain compatibility with different data base management systems or improve performance.

Recent developments in storage technologies have given computer system designers a wide range to consider in building large on-line systems. It is important that the requirements of each component of a proposed system be carefully recognized before choosing a particular technology for its implementation. The design of a database computer which takes advantage of emerging technologies has been proposed. In this paper, the design of an important component of the database computer, namely, the structure memory, is described. Three design alternatives using three different technologies are proposed. These are magnetic bubble memories, charge-coupled devices, and electron beam addressable memories. The relationship of the structure memory with other components of the database computer is briefly outlined.