Architecture of a Database System (Foundations and Trends(r) in Databases)

Database Management Systems (DBMSs) are a ubiquitous and critical component of modern computing, and the result of decades of research and development in both academia and industry. Architecture of a Database System presents an architectural discussion of DBMS design principles, including process models, parallel architecture, storage system design, transaction system implementation, query processor and optimizer architectures, and typical shared components and utilities. Successful commercial and open-source systems are used as points of reference, particularly when multiple alternative designs have been adopted by different groups. Historically, DBMSs were among the earliest multi-user server systems to be developed, and thus pioneered many systems design techniques for scalability and reliability now in use in many other contexts. While many of the algorithms and abstractions used by a DBMS are textbook material, Architecture of a Database System addresses the systems design issues that make a DBMS work. Architecture of a Database System is an invaluable reference for database researchers and practitioners and for those in other areas of computing interested in the systems design techniques for scalability and reliability that originated in DBMS research and development.

Joseph M. Hellerstein is Professor, Computer Science Division, at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director, Intel Research Berkeley.

Michael Stonebraker is Adjunct Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

James Hamilton graduated from the University of Toronto Medical School in 1957 and was engaged in family practice before completing a psychiatric residency in Michigan in 1964. He obtained board-certification in 1968 and was a full-time member of the Departments of psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati, Yale and the Medical College of Wisconsin before coming to New Mexico in 1988 to run a private psychotherapy practice. He has published extensively in the psychiatric and psychoanalytic literature on various theoretical and clinical issues. He has also made numerous presentations at meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the Academy of Psychoanalysis, most recently two papers to the former in 2006 on subjective elements in art criticism and the efficacy of sublimation in the life and work of Willem de Kooning.