Database Management Systems, 3rd Edition

I'm a "practitioner", not a student. I've worked as a DBA and a developer and have some graduate education in Computer Science, so maybe I'm not in the target audience. I never formally studied databases and I bought this book because I was considering taking a course for which this was the textook. I just read the book, instead. Cover to cover. I think this is a fantastic book for self study. I've seen a lot of textbooks but I have never seen one that explains the internals of a database management system so well. It also explains DBMS's from the point of view of an application developer. The book is light on theory but not patronizing. The most important aspects of normalization theory are actually explained very well. There are also good survey chapters on many research topics like Spatial Databases and Object/Relational Databases. Most things are explained very well and I found the book quite readable.

I am Professor in computer science at University of Paris Sud and I have been teaching databases for 15 years at different levels: undergraduate and graduate. Obviously I do not use only one book. In general I use Abiteboul&Hull&Vianu as well as Ullmann's principles of database systems second edition for theorical aspects, Ullmann&Widom (A first course in database systems) for an introductory course, for concurrency control and recovery: Bernstein&Goodman&Hadzilacos. For database tuning aspects I use Shasha's Database tuning. but I found Ramakrishnan&Gehrke's book one of the most complete and detailed book on the subject. I completely rely on it for teaching system issues of database systems. It is a very good textbook.

So I've basically reversed this review. You might look at the copyright page and notice that at the bottom, just above the copyright, it says 'INTERNATIONAL EDITION ISBN 0-07-115110-9' despite what it says on the back cover. They ALL say this. I think what happened is that the publisher just reused the copyright page of the Int'l Ed. Other than that, the cover is nice, the pages are sort of glossy and not at all newspapery, and the text is crisp: three good signs that you don't have an int'l edition in general.

Great book for learning database management

I was a little hesitant to buy a used book online, but this one was as good as new.

The textbook comes complete with great online supplemental information, but that doesn't make it a great textbook. I've found that the material is often not explained thoroughly enough. Also, some of the exercises expect you to know about concepts that are not covered adequately in the text (for example, there are questions on 2NF, and there is no more than a couple sentences on the subject). The material as a whole is not explained very clearly, and the chapters on the lower-level subject material (systems) are not quite up to par. I suppose the reason I was a bit disappointed is because this is such an important subject, and I was hoping for a real keeper. This book is decent, but definitely not great.

great deal for a textbook. i never opened it. my friend in industry helped me for the class. i have no idea how good or bad this book is, i'm sorry.

I really liked this book. It explained database management systems very well, and wasn't too boring to read either! I also really like how they use pretty much the same database example throughout the book. That makes it much faster and easier to read.

The delivery was very fast and the price cheap.

Great book. In much detail. Bought it used but is like new! Couldn't say any difference!

arrived on time in really good shape like a brand new one

A nice book for DB learner. It covers almost all of the DB knowledge.I bought it in the last term of my postgraduate study sesstion. I study it myself twice.

Fingerprints on the covers and inside of the book. A little dirty...