Re: New advanced book on index design

BobTheDataBaseBoy wrote:
> Lauri wrote:
>
>> There is a new book on indexing SQL-DBMS'es
>> by Tapio Lahdenmaki and Michael Leach.
>>
>> Relational Database Index Design and the Optimizers
>> See
>> http://tinyurl.com/84g95
>> (Amazon-link)
>
> saw the title, intrigued (and get a massive discount since The Wife
> works at a bookstore), got it.

Wow, that was fast!

>
> couple of points i don't like:
>
> the authors treat a RDBMS from the point of view of COBOL cursor traversal.

That is probably true since their background is in the 70's and 80's and in big iron MVS/DB2 -systems. Still, I would argue that most issues from those days are still valid.

>
> they don't spend any time discussing how to force buffer writes to
> commits; the source of real performance (a bit on the edge, sure).

How does that happen? And why would you want to force buffer writes to commits?

>
> there's no math of significance.
>

In the 80's his courses (Lahdenmaki) had lot's of math, but it turned out that the formulas were not very usefull in practice. The formulas where simplified ever more
(see e.g. http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg242549.pdf) and his latest courses have further deemphasized exact calculations.

What particular math were you missing?

> the Tow or Gulutzan books provide (mutually different) points of view on
> performance. you really need all three. not to mention your vendor
> manuals.
>

I have not read the Tow or Guluzan books. What is the viewpoint that the new book does not cover (and which one does it cover well, in your opinion)?

One thing that I personally think that is missing is the application architecture view point, i.e. how architecture influences performance. The viewpoint of the book is strictly confined to the DBMS, i.e. how to get stuff out of the DBMS as fast as possible.

However, the title is "Relational *Index* Design and the Optimizers"

Regards,
Lauri Pietarinen Received on Mon Aug 22 2005 - 08:12:43 CEST