I do not recommend this book. It covers a lot of topics, but only briefly (like it was written in a race to cover all the words in a big list of key technical terms). The writing is often poor and completely opaque: there are sentences I've read over and over again and still cannot figure out what the author is trying to say.
More and more I find myself just looking at the title of a section and then looking up that concept on wikipedia for a much better treatment of the topic. I think that's the main value of this book: look a the table of contents and just look at wikipedia for each section and save yourself the cost of the book.
I find it hard to believe that the people who gave this 5 stars actually read the entire book. The first half is a superficial review of database concepts (mostly just B-trees which are the focus of chapters 2, 4, and 6; and then LSM trees in chapter 7). Read the wikipedia article on B-trees and the original LSM Tree paper (free online) to get a better treatment. The second half (distributed systems) is particularly bad, so if you're more interested in that, frankly just google "Patterns of Distributed Systems" on Martin Fowler's page. It's free and much better.
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Sharing the knowledge of experts
O'Reilly's mission is to change the world by sharing the knowledge of innovators. For over 40 years, we've inspired companies and individuals to do new things (and do them better) by providing the skills and understanding that are necessary for success.
Our customers are hungry to build the innovations that propel the world forward. And we help them do just that.
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From the Preface
Who is this book for?
In conversations at technical conferences, I often hear the same question: “How can I learn more about database internals? I don’t even know where to start.” Most of the books on database systems do not go into details of storage engine implementation, and cover the access methods, such as B-Trees, on a rather high level. There are very few books that cover more recent concepts, such as different B-Tree variants and log-structured storage, so I usually recommend reading papers.
Everyone who reads papers knows that it’s not that easy: you often lack context, the wording might be ambiguous, there’s little or no connection between papers, and they’re hard to find. This book contains concise summaries of important database systems concepts and can serve as a guide for those who’d like to dig in deeper, or as a cheat sheet for those already familiar with these concepts.
Not everyone wants to become a database developer, but this book will help people who build software that uses database systems: software developers, reliability engineers, architects, and engineering managers.
If your company depends on any infrastructure component, be it a database, a messaging queue, a container platform, or a task scheduler, you have to read the project change-logs and mailing lists to stay in touch with the community and be up-to-date with the most recent happenings in the project.
Understanding terminology and knowing what’s inside will enable you to yield more information from these sources and use your tools more productively to troubleshoot, identify, and avoid potential risks and bottlenecks. Having an overview and a general understanding of how database systems work will help in case something goes wrong. Using this knowledge, you’ll be able to form a hypothesis, validate it, find the root cause, and present it to other project maintainers.
This book is also for curious minds: for the people who like learning things without immediate necessity, those who spend their free time hacking on something fun, creating compilers, writing homegrown operating systems, text editors, computer games, learning programming languages, and absorbing new information.
The reader is assumed to have some experience with developing backend systems and working with database systems as a user. Having some prior knowledge of different data structures will help to digest material faster.
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Summarized Recent Overview of Storage & Distributed Systems
Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2019
Mastery in systems abstraction comes through a philosophical pivot. While an enthusiastic beginner considers successful "use cases", an experienced traveler - through her implicit awareness of futility against entropy - often only considers failure and just tries her best. As more systems, and more of every system, are being dictated by the twin forces of economics and architectural modernism, a much higher percentage of design and development efforts in software should be dedicated to understanding fundamentals (CPU registers, branch prediction etc.) and essential complexities (multi-node consensus, replication failures etc.). This book is a good start.Database Internals is divided into two parts - the first deals with database storage. Especially good sections put a 9-cell flash-light on how many recent architectures are indeed built to tackle complexity bottom-up. i.e., LSM (log-structured merge) trees nicely complement the "write amplification" of Solid-State Disks. The discussion on the canonical B-tree and its multiple siblings (especially Bw-tree) is very well done. The functional difference between locks and latches would be enlightening even for experienced database practitioners - locks are used to manage transactions, latches to guard the *physical* storage representation.The second half of the book focusing on distributed systems is more uneven in quality. It is, however, a great start of economized discussion of about 50 "Best Papers" on Leader Election, Failure/Crash detection, Replication and how distributed systems friendly "consensus protocols", rather than atomic ones like 2-phase commit work better. In many ways, distributed systems have veered from monarchy (single, immutable leader deciding everything, including the next leader) to a true republic (leader is still almost omnipotent, but is regularly replaced by the constituents). The comparative analysis of Paxos, ZAB and Raft - with clear sequence diagrams - is very well done.The quality of writing is good, though could have been helped with more ruthless editing. The area covered is simply too broad, other than the intersect of SSDs and Modern DB architecture which is very deep and very good. Still the book easily deserves at least 4-stars for the enthusiasm and for its good attempt to convey distributed systems pedagogy to general practitioners. Pair it with Martin Kleppmann's "Designing Data Intensive Applications" and Ken Birman's "Guide to Reliable Distributed Systems".
Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2019
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 19, 2022
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 30, 2019
Database Internals is divided into two parts - the first deals with database storage. Especially good sections put a 9-cell flash-light on how many recent architectures are indeed built to tackle complexity bottom-up. i.e., LSM (log-structured merge) trees nicely complement the "write amplification" of Solid-State Disks. The discussion on the canonical B-tree and its multiple siblings (especially Bw-tree) is very well done. The functional difference between locks and latches would be enlightening even for experienced database practitioners - locks are used to manage transactions, latches to guard the *physical* storage representation.
The second half of the book focusing on distributed systems is more uneven in quality. It is, however, a great start of economized discussion of about 50 "Best Papers" on Leader Election, Failure/Crash detection, Replication and how distributed systems friendly "consensus protocols", rather than atomic ones like 2-phase commit work better. In many ways, distributed systems have veered from monarchy (single, immutable leader deciding everything, including the next leader) to a true republic (leader is still almost omnipotent, but is regularly replaced by the constituents). The comparative analysis of Paxos, ZAB and Raft - with clear sequence diagrams - is very well done.
The quality of writing is good, though could have been helped with more ruthless editing. The area covered is simply too broad, other than the intersect of SSDs and Modern DB architecture which is very deep and very good. Still the book easily deserves at least 4-stars for the enthusiasm and for its good attempt to convey distributed systems pedagogy to general practitioners. Pair it with Martin Kleppmann's "Designing Data Intensive Applications" and Ken Birman's "Guide to Reliable Distributed Systems".
Summarized Recent Overview of Storage & Distributed Systems
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 30, 2019
Mastery in systems abstraction comes through a philosophical pivot. While an enthusiastic beginner considers successful "use cases", an experienced traveler - through her implicit awareness of futility against entropy - often only considers failure and just tries her best. As more systems, and more of every system, are being dictated by the twin forces of economics and architectural modernism, a much higher percentage of design and development efforts in software should be dedicated to understanding fundamentals (CPU registers, branch prediction etc.) and essential complexities (multi-node consensus, replication failures etc.). This book is a good start.Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 30, 2019
Database Internals is divided into two parts - the first deals with database storage. Especially good sections put a 9-cell flash-light on how many recent architectures are indeed built to tackle complexity bottom-up. i.e., LSM (log-structured merge) trees nicely complement the "write amplification" of Solid-State Disks. The discussion on the canonical B-tree and its multiple siblings (especially Bw-tree) is very well done. The functional difference between locks and latches would be enlightening even for experienced database practitioners - locks are used to manage transactions, latches to guard the *physical* storage representation.
The second half of the book focusing on distributed systems is more uneven in quality. It is, however, a great start of economized discussion of about 50 "Best Papers" on Leader Election, Failure/Crash detection, Replication and how distributed systems friendly "consensus protocols", rather than atomic ones like 2-phase commit work better. In many ways, distributed systems have veered from monarchy (single, immutable leader deciding everything, including the next leader) to a true republic (leader is still almost omnipotent, but is regularly replaced by the constituents). The comparative analysis of Paxos, ZAB and Raft - with clear sequence diagrams - is very well done.
The quality of writing is good, though could have been helped with more ruthless editing. The area covered is simply too broad, other than the intersect of SSDs and Modern DB architecture which is very deep and very good. Still the book easily deserves at least 4-stars for the enthusiasm and for its good attempt to convey distributed systems pedagogy to general practitioners. Pair it with Martin Kleppmann's "Designing Data Intensive Applications" and Ken Birman's "Guide to Reliable Distributed Systems".
Images in this review
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 17, 2020
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 16, 2021
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 6, 2022
Top reviews from other countries
Vladimir Kazanov
A very good book with developers already working with databases and database-like systems
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 28, 2020Amazon Customer
Technically very light
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 1, 2022Daniel Starns
Good knowledge, not sure how practical
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 27, 2020Bilal A. Hasan
Decent coverage, but lacks dwell time on ideas: not an effective learning tool.
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on December 4, 2019Tiago Deliberali
Incredible details about database
Reviewed in Brazil 🇧🇷 on June 23, 2021
