The slides for this text are organized into chapters. This lecture covers Chapter 1, and is an overview of database systems. The material is standard, with one exception: The discussion of transactions, concurrency control, and recovery is perhaps more in-depth than usual in a first lecture, and this deserves some explanation. Students will (in typical course sequences) not be exposed to this material until much later in the course, and I find it useful for them to have a little background knowledge. This helps, for instance, when explaining why a buffer manager needs to support selective forcing of pages (because write-ahead logging requires it). It is also an important and engaging topic that draws students into the subject immediately. Sometimes, the interactions go so far that I move up the overview material on CC and recovery from Chapter 16, and cover it as Lecture 2! (Note that this can be readily done since Chapter 16 does not rely on any intervening chapters.)