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Making Databases Work: The Pragmatic Wisdom of Michael Stonebraker
This book celebrates Michael Stonebraker's accomplishments that led to his 2014 ACM A.M. Turing Award "for fundamental contributions to the concepts and practices underlying modern database systems."
The book describes, for the broad computing community, the unique nature, significance, and impact of Mike's achievements in advancing modern database systems over more than forty years. Today, data is considered the world's most valuable resource, whether it is in the tens of millions of databases used to manage the world's businesses and governments, in the billions of databases in our smartphones and watches, or residing elsewhere, as yet unmanaged, awaiting the elusive next generation of database systems. Every one of the millions or billions of databases includes features that are celebrated by the 2014 Turing Award and are described in this book.
Why should I care about databases? What is a database? What is data management? What is a database management system (DBMS)? These are just some of the questions that this book answers, in describing the development of data management through the achievements of Mike Stonebraker and his over 200 collaborators. In reading the stories in this book, you will discover core data management concepts that were developed over the two greatest eras (so far) of data management technology.
The book is a collection of 36 stories written by Mike and 38 of his collaborators: 23 world-leading database researchers, 11 world-class systems engineers, and 4 business partners. If you are an aspiring researcher, engineer, or entrepreneur you might read these stories to find these turning points as practice to tilt at your own computer-science windmills, to spur yourself to your next step of innovation and achievement.
The book describes, for the broad computing community, the unique nature, significance, and impact of Mike's achievements in advancing modern database systems over more than forty years. Today, data is considered the world's most valuable resource, whether it is in the tens of millions of databases used to manage the world's businesses and governments, in the billions of databases in our smartphones and watches, or residing elsewhere, as yet unmanaged, awaiting the elusive next generation of database systems. Every one of the millions or billions of databases includes features that are celebrated by the 2014 Turing Award and are described in this book.
Why should I care about databases? What is a database? What is data management? What is a database management system (DBMS)? These are just some of the questions that this book answers, in describing the development of data management through the achievements of Mike Stonebraker and his over 200 collaborators. In reading the stories in this book, you will discover core data management concepts that were developed over the two greatest eras (so far) of data management technology.
The book is a collection of 36 stories written by Mike and 38 of his collaborators: 23 world-leading database researchers, 11 world-class systems engineers, and 4 business partners. If you are an aspiring researcher, engineer, or entrepreneur you might read these stories to find these turning points as practice to tilt at your own computer-science windmills, to spur yourself to your next step of innovation and achievement.
- GenresProgramming
730 pages, ebook
Published December 14, 2018
59 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 27, 2021
I understand that this is a collection of essays, not the real book. But the structure of the this collection is so far from being great.
For some reason they decided to keep iterating though Stonebraker's main milestones from different perspectives.
From the first chapter you get the idea of man's life progression: ingress, postgress, aurora, c-store, h-store, tamer.
But in each section of the book they would keep repeating through this progression. So instead of getting full dump of knowledge about c-store (and vertica) in one section, you'll get just pieces of it.
And because essays are written by different people, they essentially have to keep repeating same intro in the beginning of each essay: what is postgres, why it's important, etc. It's such bizarre structure.
At the end the book presents real whitepapers from Michael, but in reverse chronological order, for some reason.
Why?
My advice would be: read the first chapter to get basic orientation, then go the section with whitepapers, read whitepapers in reverse order (that would make it chronological), maybe read the interview (part 3) and be done with the book honestly. The rest of it is just some random anecdotes and bits of memories of different people.
I enjoy reading biographies every now and then, but it has to be properly structured, which is not the case with this book.
For some reason they decided to keep iterating though Stonebraker's main milestones from different perspectives.
From the first chapter you get the idea of man's life progression: ingress, postgress, aurora, c-store, h-store, tamer.
But in each section of the book they would keep repeating through this progression. So instead of getting full dump of knowledge about c-store (and vertica) in one section, you'll get just pieces of it.
And because essays are written by different people, they essentially have to keep repeating same intro in the beginning of each essay: what is postgres, why it's important, etc. It's such bizarre structure.
At the end the book presents real whitepapers from Michael, but in reverse chronological order, for some reason.
Why?
My advice would be: read the first chapter to get basic orientation, then go the section with whitepapers, read whitepapers in reverse order (that would make it chronological), maybe read the interview (part 3) and be done with the book honestly. The rest of it is just some random anecdotes and bits of memories of different people.
I enjoy reading biographies every now and then, but it has to be properly structured, which is not the case with this book.
March 27, 2023
There are some interesting bits in this collection of essays, but there's also a lot of smarmy, self-congratulatory corporate-speak. One is probably best served by skimming rapidly, especially since there are many recaps of the same periods of history from a variety of points of view — though most don't differ enough for it to feel useful.
I found most of the codeline essays the best, with really interesting details of specific problems and how they overcame them in at least the Postgres, Streambase, Vertica, and VoltDB ones. I'd read whole books by those folks. If you're really interested in these systems, this book is worth the read just for this.
There is some "pragmatic wisdom" from Stonebraker, mostly indirectly from his hagiographers, but in the end we are left with his papers for wisdom — most people would be just as well served by reading the red book.
I found most of the codeline essays the best, with really interesting details of specific problems and how they overcame them in at least the Postgres, Streambase, Vertica, and VoltDB ones. I'd read whole books by those folks. If you're really interested in these systems, this book is worth the read just for this.
There is some "pragmatic wisdom" from Stonebraker, mostly indirectly from his hagiographers, but in the end we are left with his papers for wisdom — most people would be just as well served by reading the red book.
September 1, 2020
There is some fairly interesting information in this book but a lot of the content is anecdotal information about what it was to work on various projects initiated by Stonebreaker. Since I am far more interested in technical details this one didn't quite do it for me.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews