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.

IMO, the people writing one- and two-star reviews haven't really read the book.It's well-organized down to the section level and has lots of excellent content.It just needs some refinement on the page-to-page level.And it needs to be brought up-to-date with current progress in the field.A fourth edition would have been really great, but it won't happen, because both authors have left academia for Microsoft -- a factor of 5 to 10 in salary !If you can get a used copy of R&G for twenty or thirty dollars, go for it.But if you're paying full price, let's hope someone has done better in the last 18 years !

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.

This is honestly the worst text book I've ever used, and the worst technical book I've ever bought. The book is riddled with poor grammar, ambiguous word choices for exercises, incomplete odd answers, and a majority of the content is out of order in their respective sections. If you're teacher is using this book for a class avoid it -- the ONLY reason a teacher would choose this book is because it comes with tests, answers and slides for teachers ).Example: "2. For each department with more than 20 full-time-equivalent employees (i.e., wherethe part-time and full-time employees add up to at least that many full-timeemployees), print the did together with the number of employees that work inthat department."Book examples don't match up with given SQL create queries, and the book is in poor condition for being the 3rd edition.