Fundamentals of Database Systems (4th Edition) [Hardcover]

Ramez Elmasri (Author), Shamkant B. Navathe (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0321122267 | ISBN-13: 978-0321122261 | Publication Date: July 23, 2003 | Edition: 4

Fundamentals of Database Systems has become the world-wide leading textbook because it combines clear explanations of theory and design, broad coverage of models and real systems, and excellent examples with up-to-date introductions and modern database technologies. This book has been revised and updated to reflect the latest trends in technological and application development. This fourth edition expands on many of the most popular database topics, including SQL, security, and data mining along with an introduction to UML modeling and an entirely new chapter on XML and Internet databases.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Fundamentals of DATABASE SYSTEMS, Fifth Edition

 

Ramez Elmasri, University of Texas at Arlington

Shamkant B. Navathe, Georgia Institute of Technology

 

ISBN 0-321-36957-2

 

“Fundamentals of Database Systems is a leading example of a database text that approaches the subject from the technical, rather than the business perspective. It offers instructors more than enough material to choose from as they seek to balance coverage of theoretical with practical material, design with programming, application concerns with implementation issues, and items of historical interest with a view of cutting edge topics.”

–Henry A. Etlinger, Rochester Institute of Technology

 

“This is an outstanding, up-to-date database book, appropriate for both undergraduate and graduate courses. It contains good examples, and clearly describes how to design good, operable databases as well as retrieve and manipulate data from an existing database.”

–Peter Ng, The University of Texas - Pan American

 

With clear explanations of theory and design, broad coverage of models and real systems, and an up-to-date introduction to modern database technologies, Elmasri and Navathe’s text continues to be the leading introduction to database systems. Current, practical examples keep readers engaged while new end-of-chapter exercises and a new lab manual provide hands-on experience building database applications with modern technologies like Oracle®, MySQL®, and SQLServer®.

 

This Fifth Edition stays fresh with coverage of the latest, most popular database topics, including:

• Mobile databases, GIS and Genome Databases under emerging applications
• Database Security
• A new chapter on Web script programming for databases using PHP

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Ramez A. Elmasri is a professor in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. He holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University, and a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Alexandria University. He is known for his work on conceptual database modeling, temporal database design and indexing, database query languages and interfaces, and systems integration. Prior to his current position, Elmasri worked for Honeywell and the University of Houston. Elmasri has over 70 refereed publications in journals and conference proceedings. He has conducted research in many areas of database systems over the past twenty years, and in the area of integration of systems and software over the past nine years. He has advised many MS and PhD students. Elmasri's research has been sponsored by grants from NSF, NASA, ARRI, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Digital, and the State of Texas. He has been an Associate Editor of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Databases and a member of the steering committee for the International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (formerly ER Conference). He was Program Chair for the 12th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER'93) and Program Vice Chair for the 1994 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering. He is the leading author of the textbook Fundamentals of Database Systems, which is used in many universities all over the world and has been translated into several languages. Elmasri has served on the program committees of many international conferences, and has presented tutorials and keynote talks at a number of international conferences. He has received the Robert Q. Lee teaching award of the College of Engineering of UT-Arlington.

Shamkant Navathe is a professor and the head of the database research group at the College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. He is well-known for his work on database modeling, database conversion, database design, distributed database allocation, and database integration. He has worked with IBM and Siemens in their research divisions and has been a consultant to various companies including Digital,CCA, HP and Equifax. He was the General Co-chairman of the 1996 International VLDB (Very Large Data Base) conference in Bombay, India. He was also program co-chair of SIGMOD 1985 and General Co-chair of the IFIP WG 2.6 Data Semantics Workshop in 1995. He has been an associate editor of ACM Computing Surveys, and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. He is also on the editorial boards of Information Systems (Pergamon Press) and Distributed and Parallel Databases (Kluwer Academic Publishers). He is an author of the book, Fundamentals of Database Systems, with R. Elmasri (Addison Wesley) which is currently the leading database text-book worldwide. He also co-authored the book Conceptual Design: An Entity Relationship Approach (Addison Wesley, 1992) with Carlo Batini and Stefano Ceri. His current research interests include human genome data management, intelligent information retrieval, data mining and warehousing, web-based knowledge warehouses and mobile database synchronization. Navathe holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and has over 100 referenced publications.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1009 pages
• Publisher: Addison Wesley; 4 edition (July 23, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321122267
• ISBN-13: 978-0321122261
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.7 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (65 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #213,861 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

57 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fundamental, though not overly friendly, May 4, 2004

By 

Andrew McCaffrey "The Grumpy Young Man" (Satellite of Love, Maryland) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Fundamentals of Database Systems (3rd Edition) (Hardcover)

I used FUNDAMENTALS OF DATABASE SYSTEMS (Third Edition) in a graduate class I took on databases, and I've kept referring to the book since then. As a student, I'll admit that it was tough to get through this book at times. It's dense and almost impenetrable, but it packs a huge amount of information and is amazingly comprehensive.

It puts theory well ahead of practical matters, which gives the novice a good foundation from which to really get a firm handle on how all these pieces fit together. The assumption is that the student knows nothing, even B-trees are devoted several pages of explanation. The student who does know nothing will doubtless find this wealth of data to be overwhelming at first (as I did). But stick at it. This textbook is not for people looking at how to simply plug things into Microsoft Access. It's for programmers seriously looking to gain a strong background in what the fundamental elements of database components and systems are.

The text starts off simply, merely explaining in general terms what databases are and who will use them. Then we quickly move into modeling how relational databases work. Data Modeling and Entity-Relationship Models are described in-depth, and the book comes back to ER modeling and mapping repeatedly. Object Models are covered, as well as the best ways of sorting records and the best way to index tables. The authors offer a wealth of information concerning the SQL language -- so much so, that there's much that I simply haven't used since reading about it, although I'm sure that more advanced database programmers in the audience will find it very enlightening.

It continues on with Object-Oriented Database technologies, functional dependencies, and normal forms (first, second, third and Boyce-Codd normal form). Higher system views of database architecture are also discussed, giving us an understanding of how different parts are working together. Optimization, recovery, maintenance and security are naturally touched on, as are distributed databases and the basic client/server architecture relationship. As you can see, this is all very theoretical, although some real-life explanations and examples are brought in. But it is by building up a solid knowledge base that will allow the reader to truly understand systems when encountered in the classroom or in the workplace.

I've only touched on a handful of things that the book details in its 1000+ pages. It's packed with mathematical formulas, computer science algorithms, schema design, and the minutua of every database operation. Its approach doesn't make things easy, but it does contain everything you'd want to know about a given item. I had to read various sections multiple times for my coursework, obviously, but every time I studied a passage, I would uncover details and concepts that I had missed the last time. Even now as reference material, I always find myself learning (or relearning) something when consulting this book.

Although in my current job I don't require a massive amount of database knowledge, I still find this an extremely useful reference guide. To be perfectly honest, I don't know if I would find this text helpful if I hadn't taken a course that taught from it. It's certainly intimidating to a beginner. But if you're a moderate to intermediate database programmer, you'll find this an invaluable guide to filling in the gaps in your knowledge. It may be a bit too dense and scary to serve as your only teacher, but you'll probably find it an important one.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Just the right amount of theory, December 4, 1999

By 

RJ ([e-mail]) (Cincinnati, OH) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fundamentals of Database Systems (3rd Edition) (Hardcover)

This book has just the right mix of database theory and its practical applications. I've studied other books of the ilk and found that this book has a leg up on them in that it doesn't get too hung up on providing proofs for concepts that are either very intuitive or just not worth going into too detailed a proof for. It also provides a good review of "modern" database techniques like Object Oriented database, deductive databases, etc.

The book could use a little more polish in terms of grammatical correctness. Besides, in my opinion, some concepts, as explained in the book, are just plain wrong. There is no way for one to contact the authors for clarification either.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Emphasizes database theory over practice., November 10, 1999

By 

Chuck Eby ([e-mail]) (Falls Church, VA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fundamentals of Database Systems (3rd Edition) (Hardcover)

If you are looking for a "How to" cookbook for a particular database or application, this is probably the wrong book for you. However, if you are looking for a in-depth discussion of the history and theory of database management systems, it would be hard to find a better book. The book would probably be best accompanying a college course on database theory, or for someone who wants to understand the theory overlying all DBMS systems. It is short on examples of specific applications, but does have valuable discussion of both Oracle 8 and Access 97.

Another nice feature of this book is that it has been recently updated and has much new information about object database theory. I have been studying this book with others, and we have joked about the copyright date of 2000 - hey we're reading next year's book!