Customer Reviews

Database Systems: The Complete Book (GOAL Series)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Years ago I read Jeffrey Ullman's "Principles of Database
Systems", which concentrated heavily on relational calculus.
Prof. Ullman is a polymath who has published on topics ranging
from database systems to compiler theory and design. I've
found that his work is excellent, but not exactly light
reading. In many cases the books Prof. Ullman has co-authored
lean heavily toward formalism (e.g., lots of equations.
See for example Aho, Hopcroft and Ullman's "The Design and
Analysis of Computer Algorithms").

I was pleasantly surprised to find that "Database Systems: the
complete book" is extremely readable and very complete
(living up to its title). The first half of the book covers
database systems at the high level, discussing relational
and object models. Even the chapter on relational algebra is
more readable that other work I've waded through. Every time
a concept is introduced the authors provide an example.
The second half of the book covers database implementation
and archiectural issues (e.g., B-trees and other data
structures for fast database implementation).

The sub-title ("The Complete Book") is not an exageration.
It is a great pleasure to find a book that covers database
systems from the user level to low level disk I/O. The authors
even provide some interesting observations on commercial
database trends. In the excellent chapter on the Object
Definition Language (ODL) and object database systems they
note that the early predictions for object database systems
proved overly optimistic since these systems did not provide
users enough of an advantage over relational systems to
displace these systems in the market.

The authors are professors at Stanford and this book is
a college textbook. The complete coverage of database
systems and the readable nature of this book makes it
an excellent reference for professionals like me who
took database systems long ago and need a complete
current reference.

This book helps you understand how databases works. The second half of the book explains how data is stored (100 pages), how indexes are built (100 pages), query processing (150 pages), transaction management (100 pages), and durability and recovery (50 pages). This is one of the best book, if not the best, on database implementation.

The first half of the book is about databases from the user's perspective (e.g. SQLs). Although I was mainly interested in the second half, I found the first half to be an excellent reference on SQL.

I bought this book because it was assigned as the primary textbook for a database course. But I have also consulted this book in courses on data structures and algorithms, computer organization, operating systems, programming languages, and even knowledge-based systems (the section on data mining).

The book is not always easy to read, because the material is not easy. The authors write very clearly, and give many good examples to illustrate their points.

I like the clean layout of the book. I appreciate that it does not have the gratuitous, gimmicky, irritating graphics and sidebars that some authors of computer science textbooks think they have to throw in to keep us amused.

This book has plenty of topics. It just covers them too lightly. I used this book for a graduate course in Database Systems as one of the primary texts and found it to be lacking a number of details. This is not my first database class and luckily I still had other texts from those previous classes. If not for that I'd have been toast. If you have to use this book, plan on buying/borrowing secondary references.

This book was assigned for a class I am taking. It is poorly written. The algorithms are not explained clearly and have important details missing. To be fair, I am not sure how this book reads to someone who is already familiar with databases, but as learning material it is absolutely terrible. I do not recommend it at all.

You cannot go wrong with Hector Garcia-Molina, the author with highest h-index in computer science and Ullman. This book is an easy reading, something uncommon for the books of this genre. It covers a wide variety of topics from relational algebra to E/R modeling, data mining algorithms and SQL; makes a wonderful textbook for graduate studies.

An excellent book on database systems, keyed for the beginner/novice. Some familiarity with databases and files is nice to have, but could be used as a first course book. The authors are all noted in their area, and the content is great...better than great, excellent. However, the overall presentation of the material -- the graphics and visuals -- are not nearly as well done as is possible (and standard) for today's top text books. More and better use of color, more case studies, and just in general better graphics/visuals would make this a much more effective (and fun) book. And that's the reason for the average rating...it's just average in its presentation and therefore its effectiveness as a text.

I liked a lot, it teaches databases basic theory, every engineer should know DB basics stuff, and this book have it all.

I found the in-depth detail very helpful to answer specific problems. Coverage of topics is detailed and complete - worked well for my needs as a intro to some topics and a refresher for others.

This book has good information, and is fairly well organized. I like the examples in every section of the chapter.

However, a lot of the Exercises are not very well presented. For example, one exercise section had about 5 exercises. Exercise 2 references 1. 3 references 1. 4 references 2. 4 references 1. 5 reference 4 AND 2. When I was doing exercise 5 it took me 15 minutes to figure out just what it was asking, and I'm still not sure that I got it right. I've never seen any other book chain reference like that before. In my opinion, referencing should make you look at no more than one other contiguous and non-further-referencing block of information.