Name: Transactional information systems
ISBN: 9781558605084

What Hacker News says

hintymadDec 2021

Mine are Statistical Inference in Computer Age, and Transactional Information Systems. Curious what other books teach us powerful concepts and tools that carry us a long way

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AlisdairOMar 2015

For an overview of basic concepts in DB implementation, I quite like Database Systems: The Complete Book (By Widom I think...). You could do a lot worse than An Introduction to Database Systems (CJ Date), although many dislike his opinionated style :-).

If you're talking about actually implementing a full transactional database system, strong foundational books are:

Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques (Gray and Reuter)

Transactional Information Systems: Theory, Algorithms, and the Practice of Concurrency Control and Recovery (Vossen and Weikum)

Neither are exactly easy reading, but the concepts therein are really important.

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skydeNov 2018

Transactional Information Systems: Theory, Algorithms, and the Practice of Concurrency Control and Recovery (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems) ISBN-13: 978-1558605084

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1558605088/?coliid=IYEILMZI5DVNM&c...

and

Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems) ISBN-13: 978-1558601901

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1558601902/?coliid=I2GWJZ9XJ5D4JI&...

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chris_wotMay 2016

Hi Peter, sounds pretty awesome! Quick question though - on your front page you say that CockroachDB does SQL - but if it can't do a join, then how can you say it uses SQL? Or is distributed SQL a different thing entirely? It does sounds like a very limited SQL subset though... I'm sure I must be missing something as I'm not familiar with your product.

Also, what levels of isolation do you actually offer? Serialized snapshot isolation appears to be MVCC, but I see you also have just snapshot isolation - what is the difference?

Edit: oh brother, the proof you link to, I just realized I bought that book some time ago and never got around to reading it... Transactional Information Systems by Weikum & Vossen, right? time for me to hit the books I guess. Still trying to get my head around that second graph you have drawn, can't work out how you have gotten it :(

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SamReidHughesAug 2010

The identification of an awesome coder is more an art than a science. One cannot rate the awesomeness of a coder, or make rules that identify a subset of the awesome coders, or do so for such of the complement. Identification can only be made by observing a subject until the inducement of an experiential intrusion upon the axiomatic framework upon which the observer's worldview is based. There are probabilistic signs that can be used for recognition, but they only work because the world has a finite population, and so you're only talking about the probability that they're the particular awesome coder upon which the rule was based. That being said, you may be in the presence of an awesome coder if..

They know some languages, and they don't know others, and you know some languages they don't know, and they know those languages better than you. And when they pull out their laptop to show you what they wrote with the language they don't know, it's a Thinkpad, and don't mind that green stuff dangling from the PCMCIA slot, it's just a really really crappy graphics card they built that runs on an FPGA that they use to run demos on a television back home.

Then they ask you if you want to try writing your own little graphics demo, and you try typing, and they're like, "Oh, sorry, I don't use qwerty," and they reach over you and set the layout back to qwerty, but then they need to change it again because you use dvorak and they had it set to the right-handed dvorak layout, because how else would you drink coffee while coding? But they quit coffee years ago because the highs and lows were bad, and now they do judo in their spare time.

Then you look at their code and find that they've defined some weird types for weird things. They've got their own custom string type, but wait, it just wraps the default string type, and it's there to stop XSS attacks in the type system. And then you look at the APIs that the different subsystems of their programs use and you find that all of their APIs are literally impossible to use incorrectly. Or when that can't happen, they're designed to be impossible to use naively.

As you get to know them better, you discover they didn't have access to a computer until college, and before then all they had was some hand-me-down HP calculator where you enter numbers backwards because they reprogrammed it to use p-adic arithmetic, which they had heard about during some invitation-only summer math camp out on the plains. And before that, as a three-year-old child they invented numerous variants of 52-card bucket sort, radix sort, insertion sort, selection sort, and bubble sort, because inventing sorting algorithms for a deck of cards and then executing them by hand was a fun way to pass the time.

One day, you wonder out loud how to solve some particular problem efficiently, and they tell you some slick solution using the chinese remainder theorem, but when you ask them a question about RSA later on, they don't really know what you're talking about because all the number theory they know they learned from music. But then when you start explaining the math behind it to them, you find that they implicitly know Lagrange's theorem (the group theory one) and don't know why.

When you ask them if they've read any interesting books lately, they're like, "Yeah!" Then they ask you what you've read, and you answer "Well, recently I've read Coders at Work, Godel Escher Bach, and Code Complete, 2nd Edition." And then they tell you all about this new series they've discovered about a wizard named Harry Dresden who wears a duster and drives around Chicago fighting bad guys.

So you ask them if they've read SICP, and they're like, "No." Then you ask what technical books they've read lately, and lately they've read Transactional Information Systems, Cryptography Engineering, a recent version of the HTML 5 specification, A Guide to HP Handheld Calculators and Computers, Fifth Edition, and Physically Based Rendering, Second Edition.

When you ask them if they know any awesome coders (other than yourself, of course), you find that they do. And who is it? Their ex-roommate, an aerospace engineer, who rarely did any coding and doesn't know anything other than Matlab and some C from "C for Engineers 101," but who made a reddit clone using PHP and MySQL one day just because he wanted a personal reddit clone for him and his friends.

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