Book review: Concise Guide to Databases

content/reviews/books/concise-guide-to-databases.md

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+title = "Concise Guide To Databases - Peter Lake, Paul Crowther"
+date = 2021-02-10
+
+[taxonomies]
+tags = ["books", "reviews", "it", "books:2021", "published:2013", "peter lake",
+"paul crowther"]
++++
+
+[GoodReads
+Summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18475615-concise-guide-to-databases):
+This easy-to-read textbook/reference presents a comprehensive introduction to
+databases, opening with a concise history of databases and of data as an
+organisational asset. As relational database management systems are no longer
+the only database solution, the book takes a wider view of database technology,
+encompassing big data, NoSQL, object and object-relational, and in-memory
+databases. The text also examines the issues of scalability, availability,
+performance and security encountered when building and running a database in the
+real world.
+
+<!-- more -->
+
+{{ stars(stars=1) }}
+
+Let me get something out of my system straight away: This book needs some
+**serious** proof-reading. The authors seem to have an aversion to commas, and
+that makes reading some sentences really hard ("Is that an adjective or a noun?
+Oh, heck, I though it was an adjective, and now things don't make sense; let me
+read that again as a noun to see if that works.") There are a lot of repeat
+content (three times there is a discussion on how HDD prices are falling, how
+the price per megabyte is falling and how SSD is faster than HD). All the
+abstracts, the first part of every chapter, are just some copy'n'paste from a
+few phrases of the first part after the abstract. And there are "is in the a
+Microsoft", "none encrypted protocol" and there is even a "[company] and there
+product". And two paragraphs one-next-to-the-other have "OS" written in 3
+different ways ("o/s", "O/S" and "OS"). Oh, and there is no definitive style for
+anything: Sometimes quotations would have a larger margin compared to the rest
+of the text and sometimes they won't; all commands (including SQL queries and
+related commands to be entered in databases) are all in the same font as the
+rest of the text (with one single exception in the end of the book); sometimes
+there are sub-sub-sections (like "14.4.1.1) and sometimes it just uses bold text
+with no numeration.
+
+But, if the book was actually nice (and easy) to read, besides all that, does is
+live to its title? No.
+
+Is it "Concise"? Well, not quite. The printed version is 300+ pages long, which
+I could hardly call "concise". A lot of content could be removed with no affect
+in the end, like the step-by-step explanation of all 5 levels of database
+normalization (which is also arguable if that makes sense in a book that should
+discuss databases), the explanation of XML (which is not arguable and feels
+completely lost in a book about databases) and discussions on what to do when a
+disk fails.
+
+Is it a "Guide"? Not quite. The book does explore (lightly) different databases,
+but fails to point **where** each makes sense: What kind of data/database
+structure makes sense in a relational database? What kind of data fits better on
+a NoSQL database? When it makes sense to use Hadoop?
+
+Is it about "Databases"? That's where the book fails hard, in my opinion. Sure,
+it talks about Oracle, and a bit about Mongo, and Oracle, and some about
+Cassandra, and Oracle, and they even mention Hadoop. And then Oracle. It feels
+like the whole book is just a huge propaganda on how to operate Oracle, how
+Oracle tools work, and so on. Sure they talk about other databases, but when
+every example is about Oracle, you have to wonder why.
+
+Another example of how the book leans towards Oracle: There is a single mention
+to PostgreSQL, saying that it "is popular with personal computer users". Heck,
+AWS RDS was launched 4 years prior to the publishing of this book and it already
+had the PostgreSQL layer. Since early 2000s, every time someone asked "What
+database should I use for my project?" there was at least one "PostgreSQL"
+answer. But, since PostgreSQL is in direct competition with Oracle, you can see
+why it is largely ignored.
+
+So, hard to read and doesn't fill the topic it proposes in its title. "7
+Databases in 7 Weeks" does a better job about being a Guide to Databases than
+this.
+
+---
+
+ISSN 1863-7310e-ISSN 2197-1781
+
+ISBN 978-1-4471-5600-0e-ISBN 978-1-4471-5601-7