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Rating: 
Summary: a nice collection
Review: This book is well-known in academic database circles as "The Red Book" (in fact, the editors maintain a useful web site at http://redbook.cs.berkeley.edu/) and is a canonical resource in those circles. It's primarily intended as a reader/textbook for a graduate course in database systems and has a heavy emphasis on implementation issues. It contains a fair number of classic papers that should be read by anybody who actually works on database engines as well as a number of more recent papers that should be read by anyone who does research in database systems. The usefulness for end-users of databases (i.e., application writers) is unclear.The 3rd edition, in my opinion, improves upon the 2nd edition considerably. Of course, it freshens the paper selection in some areas. More importantly, it prunes the number of subject areas considerably, resulting in a more manageable collection (in more ways than one!). For example, a great deal of work was performed in the late 1980s and early 1990s in areas such as extensibility and active database management. By the late 1990s, the SQL3/SQL1999 train had already left the station - work still goes on in these areas, but at a greatly reduced rate. Conversely, data mining and decision analysis have become hugely important areas, and the new Red Book has a section on it. If there's a place where this book "missed the boat," it would probably be in terms of applications. The editors cut the section on user interfaces and programming models and have always ignored unstructured/semistructured data models. In these days of the Web, this choice is questionable; on the other hand, a lot of the most reasonable work in these areas has in fact appeared since 1998, so it's a bit hard to criticize with any degree of fairness!
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