Reviews for Databases in Depth: The Relational Model for Practitioners

The average rating for Databases in Depth: The Relational Model for Practitioners based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-09-23 00:00:00 Jason Homes Awesome book, greatly recommended. Let me start with two disclaimers: * I'm writing the review after re-reading the book. My tone is probably less excited than it would have been if this was a first reading. * This book is "superseded" by another, called "SQL and Relational Theory". You should probably read that instead. Despite the name, this book is a gentle introduction to the relational theory. It explains the theoretical underpinnings of RDBMSs. If you don't know this stuff, the book is amazing. It uses a very understandable language and doesn't get too much into the math). It makes some very good points about how to use a relational databases (for example, why NULL values can be evil). There's even a chapter on normal forms that goes into satisfying detail. There are two downsides. First, the author is zealous at times. There is a lot of SQL-bashing that's not constructive - you get that it's not a great language the first time. Every rant rant after that gets annoying. Second, the practical application of the ideas in the book are a bit limited. It would be awesome if we can do everything C. J. Date talks about, but unfortunately existing RDBMS products don't allow it. Apart from that, it's a great book. It paints a picture of how relational databases should look like and leaves you sad that all the *SQL products look very differently.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-03-19 00:00:00 Amirhossein Aminsharifi Not all those who wish to learn more about the innards of databases have a deep knowledge of math and are straight out of the academy. This was a very high-brow book, oftentimes hard to read and follow because of the heavily academic language. But I did it. This book gave me a good understanding of the theoretical background on which databases are built and that's great, but it can be written slightly better.