Customer Reviews

Database Management Systems Package Ed E-Text (Website)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

I also had to buy this book because it was required for a course I was taking. This book is probably one of the worst text books I have ever read. Mostly, I found the author's style of writing awkward and difficult to read, hence making learning new concepts unecessarily effortful. The author seems to know what he is talking about, but has a poor way of explaining it. I would not recommend this book.

Overall, I like this book. It is well presented and formatted and a better introduction to the concepts than computer-science oriented books like the C.J. Date book. The book is fairly modular and provides chapter references to potentially prerequisite topics that may reside earlier or later in the book.

One problem I did have is that there are sometimes some loose ends left hanging. I realize that not everything can be covered, but sometimes a concept will be mentioned and it is stated that a full discussion is out of scope for the book. Fair enough, but the explanation that is given of the concept is sometimes not sufficient to make any discussion of it worth the effort. This is a minor problem, though, because most of the topics are covered with sufficient detail to get a high-level understanding.

This book is really good for Database Design and certain topics like Query Optimiztaion,Relational Calculus are well dealt.Advanced Topics in Databases are poorly dealt.some of the Topics which really needs some update are OLAP,Datamining and Decision Support,Performance Tuning.