distributed databases

Well organized, complete, nontrivial, wealth of sample code, interesting historical notes, good index. Magnificent work. Definitely worth the money.

For nearly a decade this book has been the definitive reference on transaction processing. Although the more recent, May 2001 book titled "Transactional Information Systems: Theory, Algorithms, and the Practice of Concurrency Control" by Gerhard Weikum and Gottfried Vossen will probably supplant this book as the standard reference, there is still much material that makes this book useful.

In particular, this book covers the following topics in more depth than the newer boom cited above:
- Fault tolerance and availability, both topics are covered in depth from hardware and software perspectives. This is unique for a book on transaction processing in that most books on the subject confine their scope to software and databases.

- A wide and complete survey of transaction models. True, some of this material is about models that are falling into disuse, but the value is the way the authors go deeply into the mechanics. I've always felt that this part of the book is the most valuable because the principles can be refactored into hybrid models. Moreover, comparing this material with the newer book by Weikum and Vossen shows that these principles are still employed in today's TP solutions.

Material about transaction processing monitors is obviously out of date, but, like the TP models, the principles still apply to contemporary systems. My recommendation is if you are going to buy a single book on the topic get the Weikum and Vossen I cited in the first paragraph. However, if your budget allows, I also highly recommend this book as well because of the depth in which fault tolerance and TP models are covered. If you want to just learn the basics of TP I recommend that you consider "Principles of Transaction Processing" by Philip A. Bernstein and Eric Newcomer because it is less daunting than this or the Weikum and Vossen book (both of which are 1100+ pages).

I used this book as a CS grad student in college
for a class on transaction based systems and it covers
how to do transactions from top to bottom. Although
it was published in 1993 the techniques described in this
book are actually more advanced than techniques
used in a lot of real world systems today so it is not
out dated. I have yet to see a book as comprehensive as
this on how to actually implement transactions. Good
book for software engineers to read. My only complaint
is that the book has a lot of typos and some bugs in the
source code listings. Also because the book is so damn big
(i.e. lot of pages) they chose to use very thin paper which
makes it not very good for using hilight markers on. Still
this is the definitive book on how to implement transaction
processing.