Rating: 
Summary: An excellent book on database systems
Review: Years ago I read Jeffrey Ullman's "Principles of Database
Systems", which concentrated heavily on relational calculus.
Prof. Ullman is a polymath who has published on topics ranging
from database systems to compiler theory and design. I've
found that his work is excellent, but not exactly light
reading. In many cases the books Prof. Ullman has co-authored
lean heavily toward formalism (e.g., lots of equations.
See for example Aho, Hopcroft and Ullman's "The Design and
Analysis of Computer Algorithms").I was pleasantly surprised to find that "Database Systems: the
complete book" is extremely readable and very complete
(living up to its title). The first half of the book covers
database systems at the high level, discussing relational
and object models. Even the chapter on relational algebra is
more readable that other work I've waded through. Every time
a concept is introduced the authors provide an example.
The second half of the book covers database implementation
and archiectural issues (e.g., B-trees and other data
structures for fast database implementation). The sub-title ("The Complete Book") is not an exageration.
It is a great pleasure to find a book that covers database
systems from the user level to low level disk I/O. The authors
even provide some interesting observations on commercial
database trends. In the excellent chapter on the Object
Definition Language (ODL) and object database systems they
note that the early predictions for object database systems
proved overly optimistic since these systems did not provide
users enough of an advantage over relational systems to
displace these systems in the market. The authors are professors at Stanford and this book is
a college textbook. The complete coverage of database
systems and the readable nature of this book makes it
an excellent reference for professionals like me who
took database systems long ago and need a complete
current reference.
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