Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems) (Hardcover)

by Jim Gray (Author), Andreas Reuter (Author) "Six thousand years ago, the Sumerians invented writing for transaction processing..." (more)
Key Phrases: persistent savepoints, undo scan, exclusive semaphore, New York, Reference Manual, San Francisco (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
This is the one book you ought to have if you want to expand your knowledge of online transaction processing (OLTP) and learn how to apply it to the real world. Transaction Processing completely covers the problems faced by OLTP systems and discusses fault tolerance and recovery--the ability of a system to withstand failures of various kinds without dropping the ball. Additionally, Gray and Reuter cover system architecture decisions, monitoring, concurrence (including locks and isolation), scheduling (including deadlock resolution), and file systems. The book concludes with a discussion (circa 1993) of the merits of various hardware and software used in OLTP systems. Although there is no companion CD-ROM with Transaction Processing, the authors do illustrate many of the book's concepts with C source code. As this is a college textbook, you can expect some dry prose and academic approaches to certain problems. Nonetheless, the authors' writing is clear and easy to follow.

Product Description

The key to client/server computing.


Transaction processing techniques are deeply ingrained in the fields of
databases and operating systems and are used to monitor, control and update
information in modern computer systems. This book will show you how large,
distributed, heterogeneous computer systems can be made to work reliably.
Using transactions as a unifying conceptual framework, the authors show how
to build high-performance distributed systems and high-availability
applications with finite budgets and risk.

The authors provide detailed explanations of why various problems occur as
well as practical, usable techniques for their solution. Throughout the book,
examples and techniques are drawn from the most successful commercial and
research systems. Extensive use of compilable C code fragments demonstrates
the many transaction processing algorithms presented in the book. The book
will be valuable to anyone interested in implementing distributed systems
or client/server architectures.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 1070 pages
• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann; 1st edition (1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558601902
• ISBN-13: 978-1558601901
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.6 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #95,003 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Showing its age, but still has a lot to offer, July 20, 2002

By	Mike Tarrani "www.tarrani.com" (Deltona, FL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

For nearly a decade this book has been the definitive reference on transaction processing. Although the more recent, May 2001 book titled "Transactional Information Systems: Theory, Algorithms, and the Practice of Concurrency Control" by Gerhard Weikum and Gottfried Vossen will probably supplant this book as the standard reference, there is still much material that makes this book useful.

In particular, this book covers the following topics in more depth than the newer boom cited above:
- Fault tolerance and availability, both topics are covered in depth from hardware and software perspectives. This is unique for a book on transaction processing in that most books on the subject confine their scope to software and databases.

- A wide and complete survey of transaction models. True, some of this material is about models that are falling into disuse, but the value is the way the authors go deeply into the mechanics. I've always felt that this part of the book is the most valuable because the principles can be refactored into hybrid models. Moreover, comparing this material with the newer book by Weikum and Vossen shows that these principles are still employed in today's TP solutions.

Material about transaction processing monitors is obviously out of date, but, like the TP models, the principles still apply to contemporary systems. My recommendation is if you are going to buy a single book on the topic get the Weikum and Vossen I cited in the first paragraph. However, if your budget allows, I also highly recommend this book as well because of the depth in which fault tolerance and TP models are covered. If you want to just learn the basics of TP I recommend that you consider "Principles of Transaction Processing" by Philip A. Bernstein and Eric Newcomer because it is less daunting than this or the Weikum and Vossen book (both of which are 1100+ pages).

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The bible of transaction processing, November 22, 2001

By A Customer

I used this book as a CS grad student in college
for a class on transaction based systems and it covers
how to do transactions from top to bottom. Although
it was published in 1993 the techniques described in this
book are actually more advanced than techniques
used in a lot of real world systems today so it is not
out dated. I have yet to see a book as comprehensive as
this on how to actually implement transactions. Good
book for software engineers to read. My only complaint
is that the book has a lot of typos and some bugs in the
source code listings. Also because the book is so damn big
(i.e. lot of pages) they chose to use very thin paper which
makes it not very good for using hilight markers on. Still
this is the definitive book on how to implement transaction
processing.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First and foremost, an implementor's book, July 31, 1997

By A Customer

I know I wouldn't have fully assimilated even half of this book in school: it certainly provides overview material approachable by those of moderate experience, but it will be most appreciated by those who have actually implemented (or are about to implement) much of what it discusses.

Working on a hot new RAID box? Parts of this book will help. How about a file/record/object system? Yup. In either case, more complete references exist (and you'll need them), but the point is that this book really does cover data management from the disk on up in a useful degree of detail.

On the other hand, if you're implementing a transaction manager, this book is both necessary and likely sufficient. Read it first to get started in the right directions, and revisit specific areas as you code - a casual comment is easy to forget if you read it before you fully appreciate its context. The authors acknowledge that there are neat tricks not covered (because they would obscure the core material) that you'd likely want to incorporate once you're sure you really understand their impact, but all the framework, and much of the detail, is included.

Bottom line: If your interest in data management is truly intense, you need this book - it should remain current for quite some time.