distributed databases

This book was chosen as the main text for a distributed database systems graduate Computer Science course I recently took. For a CS course on the subject, it is an obvious pick since not many related texts exist on the market. The text is good, but needs updating since it was published in 1999. Research papers from IEEE and ACM were relied on as supplementary reading, since research in DDBS continues, and much has been written in the last four years.

I think this book is poorly written. The authors go a long way describing all kinds of taxonomies (look at the abundance of 3d diagrams such as Figure 4.11) without letting the user grasp the major ideas. Just check the discussion on the 10 types of distributed databases in chapter 4.

They also spend a lot of time and paper describing relatively simple concept without actually making the concepts any clearer. Some concepts never get defined so it's not clear why they had to be mentioned, check 13.4.2 and try to figure out what the convoy effect is.

I think the main problem of this book is that it tries to please to wide an audience: undergrad students, database researchers, and practitioners. I don't think the book is of much value for any of these categories of people.

I'm a practicing DB engineer. I bought the book since it seems to be a popular graduate level textbook, and I needed to expand my understanding of distributed, federated, and multi-database systems. The book provides a broad overview of concepts and alternative architectures. There is some detailed theory in the text, which won't be useful to most DB practicioners, but if you prefer diving right into the deep end of new topics, this book is a good place to start. No info in this book on specific products or vendor approaches. I'm still climbing this learning curve, so I can't compare this to other books that are widely available (several dozen right here on Amazon.com.) A related topic, apparently still being researched, is database integration. This book touches on that topic (without calling it that), but so far the best info I've found is in IEEE and SIGMOD journals. I don't have any complaints about readability, perhaps because I bought the book expecting to take plenty of time studying it.