An introduction to database systems

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1. gregjorOct 2022
   Query parsing, optimization, execution plans have to do with the SQL language. Relational databases (and some non-relational databases) use the SQL language but that language has little to do with the fundamentals of databases. The relational model has almost nothing to do with the query language, in other words.

   I recommend Chris (C. J.) Dates books on databases. Introduction to Database Systems for a start.

   Databases, especially relational databases, sit at the core of most business and web applications. Learning how to design, implement, and use databases effectively gives one a skill that will pay off for a long time, an entire career for some people.

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2. cafardJul 2022
   I think C.J. Date's An Introduction to Database Systems is good, also Gray and Reuter's Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques.
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3. hyperman1May 2022
   Some advice from the dark ages 20 years ago:

   I learned a big part from 'An introduction to Database Systems' from C.J.Date. The core understanding of relational databases is in there. It was at the time a book that needed cleaning up and reorganizing, but a few editions have passed by now, so maybe that has happened.

   I also learned a lot of Tom Kyte's Expert 1 on 1. Beware: A huge tome, not only good for swatting flies, it can manage small rodents as well. I had the first or second edition which is probably pretty dated by now, but it is a good book to pick up the DBA attitude and learn advanced querying. If you use it as inspiration and not as a reference, it will probably still work.

   Even if the 2nd book is about Oracle, I would suggest to start learning postgres, it is a cleaner, better structured database today.

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4. cafardDec 2021
   Operating Systems: Design and Implementation by Andrew Tanenbaum

   Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach by Hennessy and Patterson

   An Introduction to Database Systems by C.J. Date Transaction Processing: Principles and Techniques by Gray and Reuter

   Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation by Hopcroft and Ullman

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5. gregjorAug 2021
   Data modeling has little to nothing to do with SQL. What are you trying to accomplish? Designing relational data models?

   I suggest Introduction to Database Systems and Database in Depth, both by Chris Date.

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6. gregjorApr 2020
   Chris Date’s book “An Introduction to Database Systems” is a good place to start. It focuses on relational databases, which reflects the dominance of relational database systems for decades now.

   Wikipedia has a decent article with history:

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database

   Before relational database systems we had a lot of proprietary setups based on disk files. There were the variants of the hashing-based Pick database. There was CODASYL, and IBM’s IMS. Relational databases pretty much replaced all of those, though Pick-style systems are still running here and there.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system

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