Database Management Systems

I'm a "practitioner", not a student. I've worked as a DBA and a developer and have some graduate education in Computer Science, so maybe I'm not in the target audience. I never formally studied databases and I bought this book because I was considering taking a course for which this was the textook. I just read the book, instead. Cover to cover. I think this is a fantastic book for self study. I've seen a lot of textbooks but I have never seen one that explains the internals of a database management system so well. It also explains DBMS's from the point of view of an application developer. The book is light on theory but not patronizing. The most important aspects of normalization theory are actually explained very well. There are also good survey chapters on many research topics like Spatial Databases and Object/Relational Databases. Most things are explained very well and I found the book quite readable.

A few years back, I created a special-purpose, custom-built, high-speed relational DBMS using just this book and general computer science knowledge. Darn thing blew the socks off more general purpose solutions and was very stable even after a crash. The book covers access methods, indexing, logging, crash recovery and other basics. If you want to know how database systems are built at the nuts & bolts level, this is for you. If you want to know how to use a database system, or how to design an application database then this is not your book; choose a "user-level" book instead. If you want to know about the latest research directions, then pass on this one as well since it only covers the tried & true basics.

It's tough finding really good database books that provide a broad range of coverage of database related topics, including the internals of how (relational) database systems work. This is one of the best database books (database theory, concepts, internals, and state-of-the-art database topics) that has come along in 20-25 years. Please note that this is a university textbook. You won't learn MS Access programming or Oracle database administration from this book; if this is why you bought the book, you will probably be disappointed. You will, however, learn a lot about database concepts and internals. There are some small errors in the book, but that happens everywhere. The examples are pretty easy to follow, and the sidebars about DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, etc. are really nice. This is a great book to keep on your reference shelf, whether you are an academic, or have a career in industry. We've been using this book at UBC for both our 3rd and 4th year database courses for several years, and have found it to be particularly good for teaching. Overall, the students seem to be pretty satisfied with it. We also use parts of the Garcia-Molina, Ullman, Widom text ("Database Systems: The Complete Book") for part of our 4th year course. It, too, is a very good book.

I compared this book with two other reference books (Date and Elmasri/Navathe). This book is the best of the three when it comes to presenting the whole database field with a special focus on the design of databases. The key differences to the other books I compared it with are that Date focuses much more on the relational model, whilst Elmasri/Navathe has many side-notes on Oracle and Access. This book by Ramakrishnan/Gehrke deals more with design aspects of databases and gives a broad, yet also somewhat deep introduction in this respect. It does not say much about any database systems on the market but focuses more on concepts. If you are specifically interested in database design, I would recommend getting an advanced book that deals with these issues. However, if you are looking for a general dbms reference book with a special focus on design, this is the best book on the market. Unlike other books (for instance Date), it is also written in a very effective manner and comes right to the point. This easy style is especially advantageous when it comes to more difficult topics such as normalization. Where others delight in formalization, this book actually explains. Solutions for half of the questions in the book can be downloaded from the author's website by anyone.

I always wanted to know about the internals of DB but could not find all the info in one place. This is the THE book for anyone interested in knowing how a DBMS actually works. Raghu Ramakrishnan is well known for excellent educational software. I have used CORAL(A Deductive Database from UW) here at ASU and expected to find technically rich material in this book, and I was not disappointed. Reading the source code of Microbase(a stripped down version of Minibase) proved very illuminating for me(especially the parser/optimizer part). Go read this book!