Professor Rosario likes to give hard tests just like Professor Eggert does, but unlike Professor Eggert, his lectures does not prepare you for such kind of hard problems. He goes through simple and easy concepts during his lectures but mentions little about problem-solving skills. To get an A- for this class, you must go to his office hours frequently and ask questions. To get an A for this class, I'm sorry but I believe you have to do many extra practice problems. Moreover, he does not curve the class based on the average but based on what HE THINKS THE AVERAGE SHOULD BE(not bluffing, he mentioned it more than one during class) so you don't really get a lot of curve benefits from hard examinations.

Rosario is actually pretty nice, approachable, and knowledgeable. But if you anger him you will get the hardest final exam of your academic career and wish that Eggert wrote the test instead. Spring 2019 got pwned lol.

TL;DR - do not take CS143 with Rosario. Just not worth it. I made a Bruinwalk account just to post this review in the hope that I can save someone from this class.

Rosario has a massive superiority complex and it seems like he teaches only to get a power trip. He assumes everybody is against him and treats students as such. He is rude and condescending and does not want to help you learn unless you suck up to him at office hours. He cares more about being right and powerful than helping us learn what we joined his class to learn. Tests/specs are unclear, he doesn't like to answer questions, and is borderline abusive on Piazza. A friend of mine was outright cyberbullied by him and others on Piazza, administration did nothing.

I as well as many of my friends have complained to administration about him so I am frankly astonished he is still teaching. This man should not be teaching. Do not think your experience will be different -- do not take this class.

The recent reviews don't lie; the class, and professor rosario, have improved since a majority of the reviews were left. I took it online and we had 5 homeworks, 1 extra credit project with spark, a midterm, and a final. All of which were pretty straightforward, and the curve prof rosario gives is pretty generous. Additionally, I never felt like prof rosario was belittling students like some previous reviewers mentioned; I asked some pretty dumb questions in office hours and class, and never once did prof rosario make me feel like an idiot (even though I probably am at times). I'm not too interested in databases, but I'd recommend most CS majors to take some offering of this course to get a fundamental understanding of databases.

He sucks and I hate him a lot

Rosario has really chilled out since last year. He was a friendly and helpful instructor during Spring 2020. The homework assignments were really doable, and the tests weren't insane.

For the first 10 weeks I really wanted to give a good comment for this professor, because his average response time on Piazza is 40 mins and he is always willing to support students (he gives us an extra 1 hours to do midterm), and his (kinda) engaging lectures. His homework (which is 40% of the grade) is generally not hard, except for the last one or two, and he gives extra credit for the one mini-project.
However, things changed. You wouldn't expect the final would be much much harder than the midterm. In midterm, we have many SQL related problem which is clearly defined in class or in textbook (or slides). Well, in the final, even though we have 24 hours to work on it, many friends of mine and me have to work at least 10 hours for a supposed 3 hours exam (he told us this exam was written for 3 hours). There are a bunch of explanation kind of questions that you can't really find the related information in the textbook (or slides or lectures), and even the textbook doesn't go in detail for those concepts. So, you have to really really think out of the box, and like use what you have learned from the past 20 years maybe, to compose an answer, not to mention that he gives few partial credit for answer that is not in his solution. Putting it simply, it's not just testing what you learn in class, it's like asking you to publish a paper for some of the questions. THIS IS INSANE.
All in all, it's not the kind of easy-A CS elective class you are looking (maybe not even easy-B). However, if you really like database systems, the lectures are good (JUST DON'T TAKE THE EXAM). So if you have other choices of professor teaching this class, go for it.

I remember seeing Rosario get a lot of from prior Bruinwalk reviews and actively tried avoiding him - then I took his class and realized how WRONG those reviews were. He's completely revamped the curriculum post 2019 and it's solid.

Rosario is awesome. His lectures are clear + engaging and follow the slides in lock step (he posts slides prior to lecture, annotates during class, and re-posts after).

Best thing about him is he works in industry as a Data Scientist / SWE, so every topic is covered with practical, real-world examples that we can actually use.

And he's a nice guy who truly enjoys teaching, and he handled COVID better than any other professor I've seen so props!

The professor was really nice and helpful. He answered Piazza posts extremely quickly and thoughtfully.

We had a mini-project for extra credit. This probably bumped my grade up from B+ territory up to an A.

I'm not sure how good his lectures are, since I just looked over the slides, but from the brief snippets of the recording I saw, they seemed okay. His slides, however, are very good, IMO.

There were only 5 homework assignments, and the workload for each of these was not too bad. I think each of these assignments could be done in an afternoon.

The midterm was okay, but the final was a bit harder. I just reviewed the lecture slides, homework assignments, and discussion slides. I received a 88% for the midterm and 80% for the final.

There are some harsh reviews for Professor Rosario here on Bruinwalk. This is more than a little bit surprising to me, as I had an excellent experience taking 143 with him over the summer. Professor Rosario was an engaging lecturer, answered questions well, and was very helpful during office hours. There are several mentions of bullying/micro-aggressions among the other reviews, and given that they are from the same quarter during which I took the class, I must have missed them. All I can testify is that he was friendly and helpful during lectures and office hours and never gave any indications of being rude or dismissive with me that I could pick up on. I felt that the workload was on the easier end for the computer science department, although Eggert has skewed my perspective on normality, and the final was based off of the class (not an accomplishment, but then again we deal with some silly stuff here) and didn't jump out as being particularly unreasonable. It wasn't necessarily the best class I've ever taken but it didn't stand out as a negative experience. I'm only adding my review so that people know that the narrative that Rosario is an asshole is not a universal experience and perhaps should be taken with a grain of salt.