The Database Application Book Using The MySQL Database System


Product Description
This book is ideal for a course on database applications or as a second book in a course on databases. It is a perfect companion for the software professional in the business of writing database applications. The author expects the reader to be familiar with relational database concepts. The open source MySQL database system is used to illustrate the writing of database applications.The Database Application Book Using The MySQL Database System Review
I initially obtained this book to help me learn MySQL - building on my prior experience with MS Access, Informix, Sybase and Oracle. What I found was a book loaded with information on relational database principles and features - many that I had never had the opportunity to learn or had forgotten in my 20+ years of database maintenance and development.Dr. Gehani starts with a brief history of various database models from flat files thru Object and XML databases and various ways of interacting with those models. The detail was just right for me to get a good appreciation of the concepts presented. The author encourages you to research further many of the topics in his book using his references or by searching for other related books or articles.
In chapter 4, Dr. Gehani presents database concepts in mathematical terms. The ideas of projection, selection, cross products, various types of joins as well as set operations are all introduced. In the next chapter, the author gets more into database design and explains the first three normal forms using excellent, concise examples.
The next couple of chapters get heavy into basic SQL as well as transaction processing. The sample database, while very simple in design, is used very well to demonstrate various SQL commands in MySQL. Dr. Gehani goes into great detail in explaining transactions including locks, deadlocks, the phantom problem and starvation. Most of my experience in the business world has involved no transaction processing and many of the concepts were new to me. I found in this chapter that I had to review the samples given a few times as I was doing the exercises at the end of the chapter to be able to understand all the concepts.
The author next discusses constraints, triggers and objects in a concise yet thorough manner. Some of the concepts were very new to me (e.g., the Check constraint and manipulating objects) but again the material is explained very thoroughly in an easy to read style.
Chapter 11 gives a great deal of behind the scenes details on indexing. Many of the concepts like B-trees, hash indexes and dynamic hash indexes I had studied early on in my career and forgotten. Most of the indexing analysis I do in the business world is simply determining which field(s) to place an index on and to measure the change in performance with that index. It was refreshing to review what I had learned so long ago as well as a few new ideas and to gain a better understanding of what is going on in the background with regard to indexes.
The next several chapters deal with security, logs/recovery and replication. In my recent positions, I have not been involved with any of these areas but I did find it very informative to read about them and to work through the examples to help me understand how my databases are kept secure and how they can be recovered if there is any corruption of my data.
The final chapter is on performance tuning which is a big part of what I do in my current job. Various concepts are discussed to improve performance including hardware upgrades, table joins, de-normalizing tables, pre-computing queries and indexing tables. Again, the examples in MySQL are well thought out and get the point across in a very understandable way.
Dr. Gehani states in his preface that his goal is to give database users, designers, administrators and application programmers the same level of understanding of database concepts and fundamentals as traditionally given to people learning how to implement database systems. He has certainly met this goal in the writing of this book. This book now sits on my desk at work where I find myself rereading various chapters or sections as well as using as a quick reference on a regular basis.
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