Self Reading:  

• See   How to Read Research Papers  for reading guidelines.
• Efficient Reading of Papers in Science and Technology (M. Hanson, D. McNamee)  
• Hints to Improve Writing of Technical Papers (P. Valduriez)  

Query Optimization:  

• Access Path Selection in a Relational Database System   Proc. of SIGMOD 1979 [1.0 class] (Skip: Nothing)
• On the Production of Anorexic Plan Diagrams   Proc. of VLDB 2007 [1.0 class] (Skip: Sections 4.4, 5.3, 6, 7.1, 7.4, 7.5)
  [Background Reading Material:  Analyzing Plan Diagrams of Database Query Optimizers (Proc. of VLDB 2005)]

Query Statistics:

• Histogram-based Solutions to Diverse Database Estimation Problems   Data Engineering Bulletin, September 1995 [0.5 class] (Skip: Sections 3.4)
• Practical Selectivity Estimation through Adaptive Sampling   Proc. of SIGMOD 1990 [1.5 class] (Skip: Sections on Comparisons with Hou et al)

Query Processing:

• Plan Bouquets: Query Processing without Selectivity Estimation   Proc. of SIGMOD 2014 [1.0 class] (Skip: Sections 3.4, 4.2, 4.3, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 6.4, 6.5, 6.6, 6.8)

Access Structures:  

• Linear Hashing: A New Tool for File and Table Addressing  Proc. of VLDB 1980 [1.0 class] (Skip: Section 2.3, Section 3 details)
• Bitmap Index Design and Evaluation  Proc. of SIGMOD 1998 [1.0 class] (Skip: Sections 3.1, 3.2, Section 7 details, Section 8 details, Section 10)

Transaction Management:

• Granularity of Locks and Degrees of Consistency in a Shared Data Base Modeling in DB Systems 1976 [1.0 class] (Skip: Pgs 372 - 378, Pgs 383-394)
• Crash Recovery chapter of RG textbook [1.0 class] (Skip: Section 18.7)

Source Material: ARIES: A Transaction Recovery Method using Write-Ahead Logging  ACM Transactions on Database Systems, 17(1), 1992

Memory Management:

• The LRU-K Page Replacement Algorithm for Database Disk Buffering  Proc. of SIGMOD 1993 [1.0 class] (Skip: Section 4 details)

Distributed Databases:

• Distributed Databases chapter of KSS textbook [2.0 class] (Skip Sections 18.1, 18.2, 18.4.3, 18.5.2, 18.6, 18.8, 18.9)

Data Mining:  

• Fast Algorithms for Mining Association Rules  Proc. of VLDB 1994 [1.0 class] (Skip: Sections 2.2, 3.2, 3.6)
• Turbo-charging Vertical Mining of Large Databases  Proc. of SIGMOD 2000 [1.0 class] (Skip: Section 5)

Data Warehousing:  

• Data Cube: A Relational Aggregation Operator  Proc. of ICDE 1996 [1.0 class] (Skip: Sections 4, 5, 6)
• Implementing Data Cubes Efficiently Proc. of SIGMOD 1996 [1.0 class] (Skip: Section 5)

Main-Memory Databases:  

• Database Architecture Optimized for the New Bottleneck: Memory Access  Proc. of VLDB 1999 [1.0 class] (Skip: Analytical cache models in Section 3.4)
• Making B+-Trees Cache Conscious in Main Memory  Proc. of SIGMOD 2000 [1.0 class] (Skip: Section 4 details, Section 5 details)

Columnar Databases:  

• C-Store: A Column-oriented DBMS   Proc. of VLDB 2005 [1.0 class] (Skip: Sections 5, 6.3, 7)
• Self-organizing tuple reconstruction in column-stores  Proc. of SIGMOD 2009 [1.0 class] (Sections 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 4.2, 5)
  

ML and DB:  

• Automatic Database Management System Tuning Through Large-scale Machine Learning   Proc. of SIGMOD 2017 [1.0 class] (Skip: Section 7 details, Section 8)

NoSQL Systems:  

• One Trillion Edges: Graph Processing at Facebook-Scale  Proc. of VLDB 2015 [1.0 class]
  [Background Reading Material:  NoSQL Databases (Survey Report) ] [1.0 class] (Skip: Sections 5, 6)