Rating: 
Summary: The only text I could find on internal working of DBMS
Review: A really good book on internals of database. I liked it coz' I never found such details about physical schema in any other book. It's not a book for *ordinary* DBMS course though.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book, an implementor will need to supplement
Review: As my first exposure to database implementation I found this book very useful.I'm working on a proprietary implementation for my company, and was able to make good decisions based on the information in this book. I was unsatisfied on the lack of depth in certain areas, I.E. buffer management, indexing schemes (BTrees, and Hashing described. Two hashing schemes discussed but neither provided enough information to implement without first solving some hard problems.) More information on various locking schemes would have been nice. All in all, I was quite satisfied with this book as a first book for implementors. Not a waste of money.
Rating: 
Summary: Make ease to tough
Review: Bad Writing, make me always doubt about my ability of understanding,if it was not a textbook,I will throw it into garbage already
Rating: 
Summary: I don't understand the purpose of this text
Review: Frankly, I do not understand the purspose of this text. It's obvious that the book covers everything in DBMS, from the very basic like SQL to the very complicated and detailed like internal schema of DBMS. Everything is covered, but not comprehensively. I think the author tries to show you just a little bit of everything. If you have extra bucks and lot of spare time, go for it at your own risk. In fact, I bought this book just because it is a required text for the semester. After buying it, I was extremely disappointed. I learned most of DBMS stuff (oracle, SQL, web programming) by searching online and on other books from shool library. But it is definitely not from this one.
Rating:
Summary: Awkward and difficult to read
Review: I also had to buy this book because it was required for a course I was taking. This book is probably one of the worst text books I have ever read. Mostly, I found the author's style of writing awkward and difficult to read, hence making learning new concepts unecessarily effortful. The author seems to know what he is talking about, but has a poor way of explaining it. I would not recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book on the internals of DBMS
Review: I always wanted to know about the internals of DB but could not find all the info in one place. This is the THE book for anyone interested in knowing how a DBMS actually works. Raghu Ramakrishnan is well known for excellent educational software. I have used CORAL(A Deductive Database from UW) here at ASU and expected to find technically rich material in this book, and I was not disappointed. Reading the source code of Microbase(a stripped down version of Minibase) proved very illuminating for me(especially the parser/optimizer part). Go read this book!
Rating:
Summary: Difficult to read, avoid it at all costs
Review: I bought this book according to my course instructor recommendation.The text is very difficult to understand.I have to read the same sentence for several times and then go back to the according powerpoint slide to try to understand what is going on. Take chapter 2, introduction to database design, as an example.Most of the text is devoted to ER model.The example is very difficult to understand.Graphical explanation should be included, but not all examples are explained in such way. Many times, when going in depth to stuffs like class hierarchies and key constraints.Litte if not zero example is provided.Read this quote if you can understand: "In contrast to class hierarchies in programming languages such as c++ -- there is a constraint on queries over instances of these entity sets: A query that asks for all Employees entities must consider all Hourly_Emps and Contract_Emps entities as well." The authors seem to be very weak in english.They love to use rheoteric questions and followed by the very same answer, 'Intuitively, no!', to try to convoy their ideas. Obviously it is not very intuitive! Avoid this book please!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent introductional book w/ focus on design
Review: I compared this book with two other reference books (Date and Elmasri/Navathe). This book is the best of the three when it comes to presenting the whole database field with a special focus on the design of databases. The key differences to the other books I compared it with are that Date focuses much more on the relational model, whilst Elmasri/Navathe has many side-notes on Oracle and Access. This book by Ramakrishnan/Gehrke deals more with design aspects of databases and gives a broad, yet also somewhat deep introduction in this respect. It does not say much about any database systems on the market but focuses more on concepts. If you are specifically interested in database design, I would recommend getting an advanced book that deals with these issues. However, if you are looking for a general dbms reference book with a special focus on design, this is the best book on the market. Unlike other books (for instance Date), it is also written in a very effective manner and comes right to the point. This easy style is especially advantageous when it comes to more difficult topics such as normalization. Where others delight in formalization, this book actually explains. Solutions for half of the questions in the book can be downloaded from the author's website by anyone.
Rating:
Summary: please get another book that is much cheaper and better
Review: I feel like reading puzzle while reading this book. If this is a book for advanced user, why my professor use it in the database introduction course ?
a lot typo in the text and many exercise answers are incorrect. countless sentences in the book just hard to read. don't waste your time and $100 on this book!!
Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: I just stumbled across this on Amazon. Thinking back to my undergrad days - I used a earlier edition (1998-9) of this book. It was a ABSOLUTELY great book. Even when I took a graduate level class in Database systems, I saw myself flipping back to this book very often. I am definitely going to buy this edition, as I lost my old copy. It will serve as a good reference book even as you prepare for interviews or actually use databases in your job. Key definitions and concepts are well explained. I recommend marking them, so that it is easy to refer back as you see yourself getting rusty with them, over the years. Absolutely the highest recommended database book! The only gotcha on this book is the price. I wish it was 20-30 bucks cheaper :(.. regardless it is well worth the high sticker price.
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