7 ms·

Readings in Database Systems, 5th Edition (2015)

225 points by kediz 6y ago

i0exception 6y ago
This needs a [2015] tag. The thing that makes the redbook special in my opinion is that the editors have been able to apply their research to solve actual problems for paying customers! You don't get to see enough of that in academia.
- chmaynard 6y ago
  > This needs a [2015] tag. That's debatable. It's a book, not a blog post.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - asah 6y ago
    Technically it's a book but the structure is actually more like a series of blog posts...
- razornova 6y ago
  where would one start if we wanted more up to date material on this domain?
  - willvarfar 6y ago
    It is up to date. Things haven't changed substantially, and they probably won't change soon either. There's nothing in the book that you'll have to unlearn or avoid applying. Its an interesting book in that 2015 was in the middle of the noSQL hype. Since then, people have started looking for results and being more critical. There's a gazillion technologies that we could list that are newer, and claims that any of them are the next big thing and will fundamentally change everything are, obviously, exaggerated.
  - asavinov 6y ago
    You might look at the concept-oriented model [1] which is a major alternative to set-oriented approaches (including RM and MapReduce). Shortly, instead of viewing data processing as a graph of set operations, this approach treats it as a graph of operations on functions which make many data modeling/processing tasks simpler and more natural in comparision to the conventional purely set-oriented approach. [1] Concept-oriented model: Modeling and processing data using functions: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337336089_Concept-oriented_model_Modeling_and_processing_data_using_functions https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337336089_Concept-o... (Disclaimer: I am the author)
pixelmonkey 6y ago
Michael Stonebraker has an interesting set of conclusions in his assessment of the MapReduce vendor market in 2015 from the "Dataflow" chapter here: "- Just because Google thinks something is a good idea does not mean you should adopt it. - Disbelieve all marketing spin, and figure out what benefit any given product actually has. This should be especially applied to performance claims. - The community of programmers has a love affair with “the next shiny object”. This is likely to create “churn” in your organization, as the “half-life” of shiny objects may be quite short."
- atombender 6y ago
  Well, he's absolutely right. MapReduce apparently didn't last that long at Google — it's long been supplanted by other technologies internally.
  - vikiomega9 6y ago
    Which ones?
    - atombender 6y ago
      As far as I remember, mostly Flume (open sourced as Apache Beam and also known as Cloud Dataflow on GCP). Flume/Beam still provides map/reduce as operations, mind you, but with a much richer processing model.
  - century19 6y ago
    But MapReduce has long been superseded by Spark outside of Google right?
- jrumbut 6y ago
  I think it's a bit of a shame that the MapReduce concept got the shiny object treatment since I thought it was a nice pragmatic approach to a useful set of problems that are faced all the time and often addressed with ad-hoc programs that make a mess. People always looked down on those that used Hadoop or somesuch for <1GB of data, but while it wasn't needed from a technology perspective it gave a structure to the project. Now many places are back in the world of one-off scripts, and I think something of value was lost (even if it was a little ridiculous to fire up a cluster for something Excel or SQLite could handle).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
omginternets 6y ago
Relatedly: I’ve been trying to wrap my head around MVCC (I’d like to write my own implementation). Any recommendations for a thorough overview of the subject?
- oftenwrong 6y ago
  https://vladmihalcea.com/how-does-mvcc-multi-version-concurrency-control-work/ https://vladmihalcea.com/how-does-mvcc-multi-version-concurr... http://www.interdb.jp/pg/pgsql05.html http://www.interdb.jp/pg/pgsql05.html
  - omginternets 6y ago
    Thanks! The second link is really excellent (as is the first, but I've already read it). I also found this paper in the refs, which seems really good. [0] [0] https://drkp.net/papers/ssi-vldb12.pdf https://drkp.net/papers/ssi-vldb12.pdf

225 points by kediz 6y ago

This needs a [2015] tag. The thing that makes the redbook special in my opinion is that the editors have been able to apply their research to solve actual problems for paying customers! You don't get to see enough of that in academia.

chmaynard 6y ago
> This needs a [2015] tag. That's debatable. It's a book, not a blog post.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- asah 6y ago
  Technically it's a book but the structure is actually more like a series of blog posts...
razornova 6y ago
where would one start if we wanted more up to date material on this domain?
- willvarfar 6y ago
  It is up to date. Things haven't changed substantially, and they probably won't change soon either. There's nothing in the book that you'll have to unlearn or avoid applying. Its an interesting book in that 2015 was in the middle of the noSQL hype. Since then, people have started looking for results and being more critical. There's a gazillion technologies that we could list that are newer, and claims that any of them are the next big thing and will fundamentally change everything are, obviously, exaggerated.
- asavinov 6y ago
  You might look at the concept-oriented model [1] which is a major alternative to set-oriented approaches (including RM and MapReduce). Shortly, instead of viewing data processing as a graph of set operations, this approach treats it as a graph of operations on functions which make many data modeling/processing tasks simpler and more natural in comparision to the conventional purely set-oriented approach. [1] Concept-oriented model: Modeling and processing data using functions: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337336089_Concept-oriented_model_Modeling_and_processing_data_using_functions https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337336089_Concept-o... (Disclaimer: I am the author)

pixelmonkey 6y ago

Michael Stonebraker has an interesting set of conclusions in his assessment of the MapReduce vendor market in 2015 from the "Dataflow" chapter here: "- Just because Google thinks something is a good idea does not mean you should adopt it. - Disbelieve all marketing spin, and figure out what benefit any given product actually has. This should be especially applied to performance claims. - The community of programmers has a love affair with “the next shiny object”. This is likely to create “churn” in your organization, as the “half-life” of shiny objects may be quite short."

atombender 6y ago
Well, he's absolutely right. MapReduce apparently didn't last that long at Google — it's long been supplanted by other technologies internally.
- vikiomega9 6y ago
  Which ones?
  - atombender 6y ago
    As far as I remember, mostly Flume (open sourced as Apache Beam and also known as Cloud Dataflow on GCP). Flume/Beam still provides map/reduce as operations, mind you, but with a much richer processing model.
- century19 6y ago
  But MapReduce has long been superseded by Spark outside of Google right?
jrumbut 6y ago
I think it's a bit of a shame that the MapReduce concept got the shiny object treatment since I thought it was a nice pragmatic approach to a useful set of problems that are faced all the time and often addressed with ad-hoc programs that make a mess. People always looked down on those that used Hadoop or somesuch for <1GB of data, but while it wasn't needed from a technology perspective it gave a structure to the project. Now many places are back in the world of one-off scripts, and I think something of value was lost (even if it was a little ridiculous to fire up a cluster for something Excel or SQLite could handle).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

omginternets 6y ago

Relatedly: I’ve been trying to wrap my head around MVCC (I’d like to write my own implementation). Any recommendations for a thorough overview of the subject?

oftenwrong 6y ago
https://vladmihalcea.com/how-does-mvcc-multi-version-concurrency-control-work/ https://vladmihalcea.com/how-does-mvcc-multi-version-concurr... http://www.interdb.jp/pg/pgsql05.html http://www.interdb.jp/pg/pgsql05.html
- omginternets 6y ago
  Thanks! The second link is really excellent (as is the first, but I've already read it). I also found this paper in the refs, which seems really good. [0] [0] https://drkp.net/papers/ssi-vldb12.pdf https://drkp.net/papers/ssi-vldb12.pdf