data storage and management

There is no such thing as "purely practical" in IT. This book lays foundations, in the good academic tradition, but is also practical, in the sense that gives design advice based on fundamental concepts. I have used this book as the basis for a "Database Systems" module which I taught a few years ago and I found it better for teaching than Date's books. The chapters are better organised. In my opinion, the blend of theory, examples and exercises is perfect. Very good book for undergraduate and graduate students who want to learn about database systems. May not be the best for some professionals with enough experience, but some chapters (e.g. on Extended Entity-Relationship models) are excellent for people at all levels.

The author has done great justice to the subject of database in the modern settings. I recommend this book as the first serious academic (yet practical) database book to read.It is not a book on a specific tool however. It is mainly a conceptual development book as it claims to be. As a faculty member in Computer Science, I have read many database books at all levels of difficulties. It is one of the best books I have read that I think has provided the clearest possible explanation on the Entity Relationship model.

Having said all these positive comments, I would like to suggest to the authors to put more in-depth, concrete, as well as practical examples in the topics on Relational Calculus and Relational Algebra in order to the students true appreciations why efforts on learning such abstracts tools are justified. Much stronger emphasis on Object-Oriented databases would be a very timely addtions to the next edition, which I sincerely look forward to purchasing a copy of, if and when it materializes.

I strongly recommend this book for a 3rd year level univeristy level database course for all faculties in computer science and computer information systems as a formal text. It is well worth every penny of your money spent.

Lawrence Lee
Vancouver BC, Canada.

Absolutely horrible for undergrad students. It assumes too much in terms of mathematical fluency, does not provide enough examples with logical steps to conclusion and provides no answer key to the exercises. How is one expected to learn if they are unable to verify their answer with a complete step-by-step solution to the exercises? Professors have a hard enough time trying to teach this course and the last thing students need is this text that only compounds the complexity of a database course.

There's lots of areas in the book where it feels like your learning English by being taught by someone who only speaks French and you speak German!

The authors assume too much and provide no answer key for their exercises which provide no metric base to measure your work - how do you know you did them correctly? it's useless! They are supposed to teach, not DUMP information on you at their level throught the entire text. In addition, the diagrams are flying everywhere - you'll find diagram n in chapter x. Annoying as hell! While this book is excellent in terms of theory and depth, it lacks in one critical area - it does NOT teach. It's a data dump with very few examples and for the more challenging examples, if provides no solution key. Even if the authors are THAT lazy not to provide a step-by-step solution, they can at least provide a solution key with just the final answer. It would be great if they could add pages at the end of the book instead of scattering the diagrams through each chapter in progressive format (E-R Model -> Tables -> Normalization, Indexing, etc....) That way, we can get a better picture of each process from modeling to finished product. The way this book is written sucks the passion out of databases.

This book is written in a form of Professor to Professor rather than from Teacher to Student. In terms of college education, it's a higher LEARNING institution, not a better BANKING institution where only the clever, experienced and genetically endowed intellectual individuals will do well and benefit from the accumulated interest for the time invested in reading the material. The text must relate to all people at all levels raising everyone from the lowest common level of experience, knowledge and talent to a level, that at a minimum, should at least be a stone's throw to the authors' level.

In terms of theory and technical depth of scope - it excels - in terms of learning from this book, it's flat out horrible. If your planning on developing DB software, this is a must read. If your not, you may want to check it out of a library and read the material that's relevant to you AFTER you've taken Cal 1 & 2 and have experience in databases.