Customer Reviews: Read 39 more reviews...
 Buy it as a course book August 17, 2007
I used it to study for a senior-year DB course and one of the authors taught the course. Maybe it was because the author was teaching from the book, but I must say my DB concepts have never been clearer. I love the sections on indices, query optimization, buffer management. I did not like the section dealing with normalization. I think normal forms are handled better in other books. But overall, I would recommend this book.
 Terrible textbook May 8, 2007
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
If this is the third edition, I'd hate to see the first two. This book is unclear and full of typos. Here's a characteristic sentence, the first one in the book: "The amount of information available to us is literally exploding, and the value of data as an organizational asset is widely recognized." I'm sure the editor's ears are literally burning for letting that howler out.
There are many other books out that are suitable for an intro to databases course. This book is coming up on five years old, and it doesn't even have an online errata list. Any technical book needs active maintenance, and this book isn't getting any.
As another example of where this book falls short, take a look at the Perl section of the book. What sense is there in a database book talking about Perl, but lacking an example of how to use Perl's DBI module?
So to summarize, buy this book if you absolutely must, but make sure you have access to a couple of other good database books like Date's "Database in Depth" or Lewis-Bernstein-Kifer, otherwise you might flounder with this one.
It's a good book for databases, but don't expect more March 28, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
A lot of the reviews on here are negatively critiquing this book for what I feel are the wrong reasons. I used this book for a senior University course, and it covered the material, and did so well, and to a good level of detail. It gives great coverage on the theoretical level and decent coverage on the details/practical level. I taught myself the whole course using the textbook references to this book (I had an attendance problem), and did fine in the course. Just be sure that your expectations are reasonalbe: it gets into ways to access databases and how to design architectures around data, but this isn't a book about jsp, or enterprise architecture, so don't expect that - but if you're ever writing jsp and need a tip on getting to your database, this book might be able to help. This is a book about data and databases, and it covers that material well.
Most confusing book I've ever read December 1, 2006
3 out of 9 found this review helpful
This book totally lacks clarity, doesn't explain anything properly. I had tough time using this book for my graduate school. Like if it wasn't enough, my prof used the lecture slides made by the book authors, and they were equally miserable. The problem with this book is that, it is too ambiguous in explaining the concepts, lacks concrete practical examples most of the time, leaves you dazed how many ever times you read it. Perhaps no one except the author himself can understand what is being said.
It is by far the worst technical book I've ever read. I'd avoid it like plague.
 Great, practical book on basic DB internals April 3, 2006
14 out of 15 found this review helpful
A few years back, I created a special-purpose, custom-built, high-speed relational DBMS using just this book and general computer science knowledge. Darn thing blew the socks off more general purpose solutions and was very stable even after a crash. The book covers access methods, indexing, logging, crash recovery and other basics.
If you want to know how database systems are built at the nuts & bolts level, this is for you. If you want to know how to use a database system, or how to design an application database then this is not your book; choose a "user-level" book instead. If you want to know about the latest research directions, then pass on this one as well since it only covers the tried & true basics.
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