Due to the constantly growing amount of data in the world, we need better ways to process it Conducting research and development in this area requires skilled workforce Different universities provide different courses to prepare people for this line of work In this paper we present our approach to conducting practice sessions wkhin a DBMS development course. We describe some of the approaches implemented by other universities, outlining their advantages and disadvantages. A popular approach is to provide students with a prototype of some DBMS and let them incrementally improve it by completing certain tasks. The two most important problems in these courses are 1) choosing a DBMS (an industrial or educational one), within which students should work; 2) deciding whether to employ an automated testing system, and, if so, which one. In both cases we take a look at several options and justify the necessity to create a new one, which we then describe. In total, we have developed the following: a base prototype of a row-store query executor, an automated testing system a set of problems along with reference solutions and test cases. Finally, we present the results of a test run involving 17 undergraduate students.