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Rating: 
Summary: Adequate, but not great
Review: I must disagree with the other reviewers. This book was recommended for a undergrad course on DBMS at UC Berkeley. The chapter on relational algebra had lots of good examples, but the book went down hill from there. The SQL examples and problems were trivial and shallow compared to the relational algebra ones. The ESQL section was pretty good, but vendors' on-line reference material made it redundant. While an overview of DBMS implementation was given, it was almost completely useless when we had to write our own DBMS from scratch. The only highlight in this section is a pretty clear example of insertions into a B+ Tree (even though the book calls it a B tree ). All in all I cannot recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Student
Review: I took an undergraduate course using this book. I have read other MK published book before and I believe the general principle for these people is... explain simple concepts using the most possible words. The book seemed padded with useless words to explain simple concepts. I had class notes to accompany the lectures and a page worth of material from the lecture notes explained much more than 30 pages from this book. However, this book does skim through various database implementation (DB2, Oracle, Ingres) and displays the differences between them. I have found this book to be impractical for reference, it is definitely a 'textbook'. If you're looking for practical SQL usage, you might want to look else where. However, if you're interested in Concepts of Database Programming and Performance Topics then this book might fulfill your needs.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for DBAs
Review: I used the first edition for a database course, and I borrowed the new edition to read a week ago (I just ordered the book today). I wish PBS would make their hardware shows more like this book. I like to watch them, but one thing bugs me: they show how you drive a screw every 4 ins to retain *this particular* panel, but they don't explain *why* that was necessary. So you don't know how to design the panel yourself, or how to figure out if the panel needs redesigning. This book is full of practical insights that help you analyze and tune a database, not just churn through SQL syntax. I think this book works best as a complement to your vendor's documentation. It takes you all the way from fundamentals to evaluating transactional benchmarks. The exercises at the end of each chapter teach you not just how to, say, add an index, but also how to evaluate the need for an index and the performance of existing indexes. (I'd suggest skipping the section on relational algebra unless you're approaching databases from a mathematical background.) The book contrasts the various database products when necessary, eg in the new object-relational section. If your database is suddenly running half as fast, or you told the customer the new hardware would speed up response and it didn't, this is the book you need. Better yet, buy it first.
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