[.ca] Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques (ISBN 1558601902)

From Amazon.com:
This is the one book you ought to have if you want to expand your knowledge of online transaction processing (OLTP) and learn how to apply it to the real world. Transaction Processing completely covers the problems faced by OLTP systems and discusses fault tolerance and recovery--the ability of a system to withstand failures of various kinds without dropping the ball. Additionally, Gray and Reuter cover system architecture decisions, monitoring, concurrence (including locks and isolation), scheduling (including deadlock resolution), and file systems. The book concludes with a discussion (circa 1993) of the merits of various hardware and software used in OLTP systems. Although there is no companion CD-ROM with Transaction Processing, the authors do illustrate many of the book's concepts with C source code. As this is a college textbook, you can expect some dry prose and academic approaches to certain problems. Nonetheless, the authors' writing is clear and easy to follow.

Showing its age, but still has a lot to offer:
For nearly a decade this book has been the definitive reference on transaction processing. Although the more recent, May 2001 book titled "Transactional Information Systems: Theory, Algorithms, and the Practice of Concurrency Control" by Gerhard Weikum and Gottfried Vossen will probably supplant this book as the standard reference, there is still much material that makes this book useful. In particular, this book covers the following topics in more depth than the newer boom cited above: - Fault tolerance and availability, both topics are covered in depth from hardware and software perspectives. This is unique for a book on transaction processing in that most books on the subject confine their scope to software and databases. - A wide and complete survey of transaction models. True, some of this material is about models that are falling into disuse, but the value is the way the authors go deeply into the mechanics. I've always felt that this part of the book is the most valuable because the principles can be refactored into hybrid models. Moreover, comparing this material with the newer book by Weikum and Vossen shows that these principles are still employed in today's TP solutions. Material about transaction processing monitors is obviously out of date, but, like the TP models, the principles still apply to contemporary systems. My recommendation is if you are going to buy a single book on the topic get the Weikum and Vossen I cited in the first paragraph. However, if your budget allows, I also highly recommend this book as well because of the depth in which fault tolerance and TP models are covered. If you want to just learn the basics of TP I recommend that you consider "Principles of Transaction Processing" by Philip A. Bernstein and Eric Newcomer because it is less daunting than this or the Weikum and Vossen book (both of which are 1100+ pages).

a must not only for the database implementation study:
If you read the book you have a clear understanding about the functionality and interactivity of the world's largest distributed database and transaction systems on different levels of abstraction. So the demands of the hardware architecture and the concepts of the software design from operationg system to application level are omnipresent illustrated and result in a feeling the reader will sense as a whole model of understanding. I recommend the book to everyone who makes decisions about serious computer questions in databases and in general operation systems. It gives also a profound example for good software engineering. By the way it demonstrates how to write a reliable (!) OS, how to propagate the certainty of having a process or not from the clock dependent processor tic(k) level to the front end ATM human computer interface. I hope there will be a next edition with updated values about the actual hardware specifications.

Very complete!:
I wanted to learn more about transaction processing and had found bits and pieces from various sources. Well, once I got this book, I realized it was the only one I needed. It covers everything in a simple to read manner with lots of details (and good references to find more as needed). I highly recommend this if you want to learn more about transaction processing

The bible of transaction processing:
I used this book as a CS grad student in college for a class on transaction based systems and it covers how to do transactions from top to bottom. Although it was published in 1993 the techniques described in this book are actually more advanced than techniques used in a lot of real world systems today so it is not out dated. I have yet to see a book as comprehensive as this on how to actually implement transactions. Good book for software engineers to read. My only complaint is that the book has a lot of typos and some bugs in the source code listings. Also because the book is so damn big (i.e. lot of pages) they chose to use very thin paper which makes it not very good for using hilight markers on. Still this is the definitive book on how to implement transaction processing.

Perfect:
Well organized, complete, nontrivial, wealth of sample code, interesting historical notes, good index. Magnificent work. Definitely worth the money.