Customer Reviews

Readings in Database Systems

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The book is an outstanding compilation of influential database papers in the database world. Most of the papers are readable for a senior undergraduate audience, or a graduate audience, but probably not for a first course in database systems, simply because students would need a decent understanding of database principles to fully appreciate the contents of this book.

In particular, I like the introductory commentary that Hellerstein and Stonebraker provide for each of the chapters. These are very nice summaries, and they also provide a teaser for the papers that follow in the chapter, and they justify why those papers were included. Both of the editors have the background to speak authoritatively on the subject of database systems, including OS, network, and architectural issues. The editors are not afraid to make prophetic comments about the direction of database research, and the challenges ahead, especially with respect to the Internet and the explosion of data.

I love the two introductory papers by Stonebraker and Hellerstein: "What Goes Around Comes Around" (about 40 pages), and "Anatomy of a Database System" (about 50 pages). The first is a summary of the major models of a DBMS: hierarchical, network, and relational; followed by other models of a DBMS, database, or data: entity-relationship, extended relational, semantic, object-oriented, object-relational, and semi-structured (XML). I intend to give this paper as a reading assignment to my senior undergrads (part of a 2nd database course).

The Anatomy paper is a wonderful overview of a DBMS from a systems perspective (e.g., buffering, I/Os, threads, dispatching, bottlenecks,
hardware architectures, parallelism, query rewriting, optimization, etc.) I'll have to see how this paper fits into the scheduling of the course topics before assigning it, since many of its topics require an understanding of both systems and database principles for full appreciation.

This book is definitely a keeper on my shelf. I'll revisit it many times.

I am somewhat biased in that I'm taking a course which is co-taught by Hellerstein, however if you're looking to complete understand how database or transaction management systems: this will be an invaluable source of information.
Crammed into this book are a number of papers detailing the history and state of database design as it has evolved over the last 40years, including most of the semainal papers in the field.
Don't expect to read this sucker cover-to-cover, take your time, but it's a good compilation.