o'Reilly Media book: Database Design and Relational Theory – Normals Forms and All That Jazz

Database Design and Relational Theory:
Because databases often stay in production for decades, careful design is critical to making the database serve the needs of your users over years, and to avoid subtle errors or performance problems. In this book, CJ Date, a leading exponent of relational databases, lays out the principles of good database design. Database Design and Relational Theory investigates denormalization, implicit dependencies, redundancy, and many other topics.


got it on 2012-07-29.

Big Data Glossary - O'Reilly Media

Big Data Glossary - O'Reilly Mediay

The TOC:

1. Terms
2. NoSQL Databases (read on 2011-09-25)
3. MapReduce
4. Storage
5. Servers
6. Processing
7. NLP
8. Machine Learning
9. Visualization
10. Acquisition
11. Serialization

Quotes from the book:

… NoSQL. It’s a bit misleading, though, since almost every produc- tion environment that they’re used in also has an SQL-based database for anything that requires flexible queries and reliable transactions, and as the products mature, it’s likely that some of them will start supporting the language (i.e. SQL) as an option. If “NoSQL” seems too combative, think of it as “NotOnlySQL.” …

pgAdmin: PostgreSQL administration and management tools

pgAdmin: PostgreSQL administration and management tools

PostgreSQL: The world's most advanced open source database

PostgreSQL: The world's most advanced open source database

MySQL :: the Sakila sample database

MySQL :: the Sakila sample database

That documentation includes a nice diagram, and that diagram led me to MySQL Workbench, now I have an idea of how to create nice database diagrams.

MySQL Workbench - a general database GUI application

MySQL Workbench - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

another column-oriented database: Apache Cassandra

I came across an article at H-Open on Apache Cassandra. The Cassandra project was actually started by Facebook, but then open sourced and "donated" to Apache, and Facebook got a Gold Sponsor of Apache. The article also includes a hint on Google's BigTable. "Cassandra is used by a number of other companies, such as Cisco, Twitter, Digg and Rackspace."

column-oriented databases

I read this article on InfiniDB, and I thought, it would help at least myself, if I took a note on it here.

The centrepiece of InfiniDB is a column-oriented back end ("engine") . MySQL database 5.1.39 serves as the basis of InfiniDB and comes linked to the back end. Since there is no indication of other storage engines either in the source code or in the InfiniDB documentation, this seems to be a pruned version.

Of course, using a pruned version makes it impossible to combine queries into different engines, I am not going to describe the disadvantages here.

Other column-oriented free databases (Infobright, LucidDB, and MonetDB) and also a commercial one (Kickfire) get mentioned in that article.

This topic always reminds me of my time in an environment, where FAMEdb got used.