Fundamentals of Database Systems (5th Edition)
by Ramez Elmasri, Shamkant B. Navathe
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ramez Elmasri, Shamkant B. NavatheEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-03-17
ISBN: 0321369572
Number of pages: 1168
Publisher: Addison Wesley
Accessories:
- Database Design for Mere MortalsŪ: A Hands-On Guide to Relational Database Design (2nd Edition)
- Oracle SQL By Example (4th Edition)
- PHP and MySQL Web Development (4th Edition)
Book Reviews of Fundamentals of Database Systems (5th Edition)
Book Review: The right balance
Summary: 4 Stars
It's always refreshing to see a book with such a nice balance of theory and practice: the topic of databases is so huge that even an introduction of this size merely scratches the surface. I had a previous 'on-the-run' experience of SQL querying before tackling this book, but I've always felt that something was deeply missing. Studying this book, and the classical literature it references, began to make everything crystal-clear! The text does not shy away from explaining core theoretical concepts, which was essential in understanding why every topic was the way it is. Thankfully, there were also a great number of examples following any newly presented formalization or theory, making the material very approachable.
The discussions were relatively self-contained, leading to an uninterrupted understanding flow: topics like topological sorting, total order, complete set of algebraic operations, soundness and completeness, axioms, BNF, btrees, and hashes were very briefly explained throughout the text as the need arose. On another topic, the 'selected bibliography' sections at the end of each chapter were simply superb, making this guide an _excellent_ secondary source to the field literature.
The book was generally rigorous, but it had a noticeable number of un-proven sprinkled statements in-between. Thinking about and proving such statements made the study very stimulating; in fact, the concepts sticked much better that way cause of the extra mental effort invested! Examples of stated, but un-proven, topics included: classical relational algebra's recursive queries infeasibility (Ch-6: Relational algebra), some presented techniques for optimizing I/O performance of the nested-loop join (Ch-15: query optimization), 'conflict serializability' of two-phase locking (Ch-18: Concurrency control), various properties of the two-phase locking variants (Ch-17: Transaction theory, and Ch-18), deadlock avoidance of various presented locking protocols (Ch-18), and so on. Depending on your time and focus, it may be an advantage or a disadvantage.
I reserve one star for _two_ important reasons: (1) the book is very pricy; no matter how good the book is, reading the field's original literature was essential for context and deeper understanding; with such a price, Pearson should've attached a CD-ROM covering the most important cited papers; in fact, something like SIGMOD Anthology two DVD-ROMs (covering most of DB research in the past 3 decades) is an essential complement to the text, especially for those of us with no access to complete libraries. (2) some chapters, particulalry chapter 12 and chapters 25-30, feels like being there to fill more paper; their different tone is noticeable and irritating.
Finally, it's important to note that this review is only based on a careful study of the _5th_ edition Parts 1 through 5 (IMHO, the book heart), covering mainly the relational model, SQL, conceptual modeling, DB deisgn, normalization, low-level data storage, query optimization, transaction processing, and concurrency control. The rest of the book (object databases and emerging research) was skimmed, so this review is not very representative of such parts. All in all, this book was a very worthwhile investment.
Summary of Fundamentals of Database Systems (5th Edition)
Clear explanations of theory and design, broad coverage of models and real systems, and an up-to-date introduction to modern database technologies result in a leading introduction to database systems.
With fresh new problems and a new lab manual, students get more opportunities to practice the fundamentals of design and implementation. More real-world examples serve as engaging, practical illustrations of database concepts. The Fifth Edition maintains its coverage of the most popular database topics, including SQL, security, data mining, and contains a new chapter on web script programming for databases.
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