He's actually ok. He teaches with many examples and slides were easy to follow. He makes sure to answer every question and come up with solutions until the students figured it out.

I have one issue with this class however. A lot of students cheated on the midterm and final. Professor noticed a very high average on the midterm (93% average), and decided to make the final harder (90% average). Even with that, many students still cheated because students are really afraid of their grades apparently. Midterm was proctored by the way on Zoom, but many students got on Google doc or some messaging app on Chrome and collaborate throughout the exam. Final was held 24hrs, but the timer will start once you click on it. Still, gives a lot of students opportunities to cheat and collaborate with each other, and the average was still relatively high. It really sucks for people who are trying their best like me, but these cheaters in my class set the curve, and the professor cannot do anything about that, because of how COVID limits a lot of options. It's very unfortunate for those honest students.

Homeworks and projects are honestly whatever. For projects, you can definitely learn something out of it and will apply to your future SDE. Make sure you use Google often because you will need to learn a lot by yourself. Homeworks, you can literally write whatever and get full credit.

I'm sure by the time you read this, you will most likely be on campus since it is likely that he will teach this class again next year. If you need a professor who teaches well, this professor is that person. I am not saying this professor is awful when dealing with cheaters. I am saying it is very unfortunate this quarter that many students cheated and that the professor cannot make assumptions to go find those cheaters. I can see the professor is pretty much helpless when it comes to academic dishonesty, and I wish I had a much better experience.

Your grades do not matter, it's your brain that matters.

Professor Cho is literally the best. I don't know why the other reviews of him are so bad but I had a 10/10 time learning from him. His slides and lectures are super organized and he explains concepts so clearly. He articulates the concepts well and uses a lot of examples to reinforce and explain things further. The projects don't depend on lecture material that much so they can be a lot of work but I learned so much from them. The tests were very similar to the homework. The midterm and final averages were REALLY high (like 85+) and I didn't do so great on the midterm which is why I ended up with a B+. But overall I cannot recommend professor Cho enough. He's got a cool personality and a great sense of humour as well. Take him!!

great class with great professor who gives engaging and funny lectures. workload are pretty manageable, cho replaced the typical hard core cpp project with a simple mapreduce project. other projects were pretty manageable if you have previous web dev experience. php is pretty easy to pickup, so im pretty sure even without much prev web dev exp, you'll be fine.

10000% take this class with cho if you have the chance :)

He must have gotten worse than he was in the past, because class with him has been terrible, despite excellent reviews. CS 3400 is a terrible classroom to understand professors in, but even then I think his lectures aren't the best. Every sentence he says is said in exactly the same way, with the same intonation at the beginning and end of the sentence, which makes it hard to differentiate between pointless digression and useful information. His curriculum is entirely different than *real* databases classes (MIT, Stanford, Berks) because it focuses on specific characteristics of databases and their implementations rather than the concepts governing database design. His tests this year were way harder than every other year for some reason (I checked previous midterms and finals) and the specs are terrible. Often, questions on Piazza will be treated as gospel later on when the TAs are grading the projects, so if you don't read every Piazza post, you may potentially screw something up. Worse yet, everyone gets great grades on everything, but if you happen to be the one person who misread the spec, you often go down 2 letter grades per mistake. All in all, I would recommend taking it with the other professor while simultaneously taking a *real* databases course via MIT OCW, Coursera, or (if you want to focus more on implementation) Berkeley's database systems course site.

Prof. Cho is super nice, and a really great lecturer. His slides give so many examples, and he really emphasizes learning. Homeworks are difficult, but graded on completion and solutions are provided afterwards. His projects are challenging but his instructions are clear and I was able to finish them well before the deadline. Projects are graded by an autograder on Gradescope which was nice, as you could fix whatever wasn't passing. Exams for this class were definitely super challenging, so make sure you really know your stuff.

I had no experience coming into this class, and at least now I feel pretty confident that I could use a database in a project if I had to.

The homework was graded on completion, but was pretty hard.
The projects were (in my opinion obviously) really easy.
There were a few group projects.
The midterm was fine, the final was much harder.
There was a curve.

Overall Junghoo (John) Cho is a fantastic professor and you should take this class if you every anticipate the need to use a database in the future.

Despite my grade, I have to say professor Cho gives very engaging lectures. He made the materials easy to understand with fun examples or exercises so that we can follow. The exams (don't know why they keep saying quizzes when they're literally 50% of your grade) were very hard and just try your best to not get behind (like me cuz I fucked up by skipping lectures) and you'll be good. Projects are really helpful and I learned the most by doing them. They are graded by the autograder so you can try unlimited time to get 100% on each project. Overall, this class was enjoyable and it's useful for everyone.

Great class. This course covers a lot of useful technology in the industry, such as MongoDB, spark, and SQL. All the projects are super easy, I was able to finish them within a day. If you know PHP, most projects will be a breeze. The HWs are graded based on completeness, so most people get full score on that. The midterm and final are easy, so the average is pretty high. I recommend using UPE's test bank to get this professor's pass exams. He does not reuse the questions, however, the styles of the questions are highly similar.

The other reviewers are right, there was definitely rampant cheating in this class, the final and midterm had very high averages. I'm going to try to ignore that, since most people reading this will have in-person tests again so they won't need to worry about academic dishonesty during tests.

The projects are fairly good, they don't take a long time and they are pretty good introductions to sql and nosql. Project 3 was really tedious however, which I didn't like; however, it did take much less time than most projects in other classes (131, 111, 132, etc.)

The things learnt in this class are just complicated enough where it benefits to have a class. You could self-study this stuff, but IMO it's better to have a foundation in SQL with a bit of math, which Cho tries to do. I would recommend taking this class ASAP, honestly in sophomore year, just because it's so applicable to SWE + SDE work.

The tests aren't unreasonable, but they are difficult. The best resources are old homeworks, old tests, and practice midterms/finals. However, I would say the tests are easier than M151B and 131 (duh), to give you an idea -- they aren't crazy hard, and I didn't feel like any of the questions were really out of the blue.

All in all, Cho is a good professor, but not great, since he doesn't publish detailed notes of each lecture (the notes are like really shoddy bullet points), and not *that* much material is covered. I would like it more if another project was fit into the schedule, but maybe that will happen in an upcoming quarter. However, Cho is a super nice guy, even if I can't understand his accent at all, I have to give him props for his enthusiasm + quick responding on Piazza. So taking a class with Cho is definitely not a bad decision.

This is a very useful class to take for working in the industry - probably one of the best at UCLA. Cho is a nice guy and he explained things well in a clear and humorous way. The midterm was ok but the final was much more difficult and ambiguous. The only downside is that I suspect some people cheat in the online exam (especially the final) which drives up the average unusually. They decide not to curve the class at all because the average is too high. I got almost perfect score on projects and midterm but messed up the final - and I had no idea how other people managed to get such a high score.