Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques (The Morgan...

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 1070 pages
• Published by: Morgan Kaufmann
• Edition: 1st Edition 1993
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1558601902
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1558601901
• Book Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.6 x 2 inches
• Weighs: 4.8 pounds

Product Review
This is the one book you ought to have if you want to expand your knowledge of online transaction processing (OLTP) and learn how to apply it to the real world. Transaction Processing completely covers the problems faced by OLTP systems and discusses fault tolerance and recovery--the ability of a system to withstand failures of various kinds without dropping the ball. Additionally, Gray and Reuter cover system architecture decisions, monitoring, concurrence (including locks and isolation), scheduling (including deadlock resolution), and file systems. The book concludes with a discussion (circa 1993) of the merits of various hardware and software used in OLTP systems. Although there is no companion CD-ROM with Transaction Processing, the authors do illustrate many of the book's concepts with C source code. As this is a college textbook, you can expect some dry prose and academic approaches to certain problems. Nonetheless, the authors' writing is clear and easy to follow.

Product Description


The key to client/server computing.


Transaction processing techniques are deeply ingrained in the fields of
databases and operating systems and are used to monitor, control and update
information in modern computer systems. This book will show you how large,
distributed, heterogeneous computer systems can be made to work reliably.
Using transactions as a unifying conceptual framework, the authors show how
to build high-performance distributed systems and high-availability
applications with finite budgets and risk.



The authors provide detailed explanations of why various problems occur as
well as practical, usable techniques for their solution. Throughout the book,
examples and techniques are drawn from the most successful commercial and
research systems. Extensive use of compilable C code fragments demonstrates
the many transaction processing algorithms presented in the book. The book
will be valuable to anyone interested in implementing distributed systems
or client/server architectures.

Reader Reviews
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). Comment | | (Report this)