Database Management Systems

When the publisher/author requested me to be a beta test site for the book about 2 years back, I thought the book written by some one who is at U of Wisconsin, written papers in logic programming would not be suitable for RMIT and gave a diplomatic reason to the author when he probed further by email. When the book was released in Australia a few months back we adopted it immediately for our 3rd year under grad. students although the book was expected to arrive a few days late for start of classes. I like the way the material is presented - keeping the practical implication/real life application in mind all the time, eg. section 5.7, 5.8 on B-trees(I rarely find these practical aspects mentioned in other sources). Query processing topics in Chap 12, 13 are presented as practical material which keeps the students interest rather than making it boring. The best I have liked so far is the coverage of concurrency control, transaction processing issues in Chap 17, 18. All the things are well tied together. Material is presented in the order that makes user understand the material - serializability is introduced right at the beginning (as against after a whole lot of definitions and theorems). Lot of insignificant(not the right word) material is made brief such as material in Section 17.8. The above topics I have read in detail and covered in the lectures. I have browsed through data mining, oodb, dist. dbs chapters and like the coverage and will be covering in lectures in the next few weeks. The complete solutions available online well complements the text material. I will have more detailed comments at the end of the semester. I do have a number of minor suggestions which is better communicated to the author. The best sentence is the one acknowledging his brother!

This book was required for my database course, so I didn't really have a choice about buying it. It has numerous typos (I stopped marking them when I hit 7 or 8 by the third chapter) which often cause problems because they're not spelling errors but rather substitutions of terms or incorrect figure numbers. Also, a large portion of the questions at the end of chapter 5 cover material that is not presented until chapter 6.I'm a college student so I don't have much money. I've had to buy 2 additional books for this course just to understand what's going on. There are VERY few examples (it really seems like the more complex the topic, the fewer examples are shown). Figures are usually only printed once, even if they are referred to repeatedly, so be prepared to spend time flipping back and forth to view a table that was shown to you several chapters ago.Moreover, formal definitions are given without explanation. As a 'learning' tool this book does more harm than good. It might have some value as a reference book because it concisely covers a very wide range of topics. The book makes more sense if you read it when you already know/understand everything (maybe that's why some instructors seem to love it). However, for students it's like trying to put a puzzle together when you don't have all the pieces and you don't have a clue what the picture is supposed to look like. By the way, I'm also a straight 'A' senior, and trying to learn from this book has been one of the most frustrating and unrewarding experiences I've had in college thus far.Just BEWARE!!!

I was forced to buy this book as my instructor follows this book in his graduate level database management class. I was really disappointed after "studying" this book. I do not know the expertise level of the author in database management but he does not know how to explain different aspects of database management systems. I think he feels obligated to use complex sentences in his book to explain various topics. Probably he does not know that in the scientific world using simple sentences are more norm than fashion. After reading some of the topics, I was really lost. For eg. on normalization the author does not even talk about first normal, second normal form but starts from the BCNF. The chapters on tree structured indexing and hash-based indexing are horrible. While reading these chapters, there were times, when I was totally confused and wondered what exactly the author was trying to convey. I would suggest to author to read the book "Modern Database Management" by McFadden, Hoffer and Prescott in order to "learn" how to write a book and how to explain topics in a simpler way. I am really disppointed with the author. I will not recommend any computer science students to buy this book for reference and would not recommend instructors to follow this book in their classes. Buying this book was a waste of money.

This book explains all relevant aspects of database systems, but in very informal way. It can be used for introduction of different aspects of databases to people that are not interested in theory, but in praxis of databases. There are some new aspects explained, such as data mining, object-oriented databases, ect. But there is no formal propositions nor proves of anything in it. So, from scientific view the book is worthless.

As my first exposure to database implementation I found this book very useful.I'm working on a proprietary implementation for my company, and was able to make good decisions based on the information in this book.I was unsatisfied on the lack of depth in certain areas, I.E. buffer management, indexing schemes (BTrees, and Hashing described. Two hashing schemes discussed but neither provided enough information to implement without first solving some hard problems.)More information on various locking schemes would have been nice.All in all, I was quite satisfied with this book as a first book for implementors. Not a waste of money.