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Comment by PeCaN | Hacker News Reader

You can read about the awesome theory behind relational algebra. Gave me a great appreciation for how awesome SQL databases actually are (and why they work the way they do).

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Databases are one of the most fun computer science topics. And I don't mean _databases_ from the perspective of an admin or even a developer, but a database developer of the internals. I love trying to read the code of complex systems like databases or language compilers.

Do you have some examples of interesting code ? I'm curious now!

You may also find this paper interesting

http://wwwlgis.informatik.uni-kl.de/archiv/wwwdvs.informatik...

I find postgres source code very interesting, e.g

https://github.com/postgres/postgres/tree/master/src/backend...

Sqlite is another good one to read, and play around with.

CPython is an interesting read. The internal type system (PyObject) is pretty cool. It also uses type pruining instead of a discriminated union.

Any good books on that?

Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques [0] by Jim Gray and Andreas Reuter. Not so much relational algebra, but everything you need to know to implement a classic relational engine.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Transaction-Processing-Concepts-Techn...

The original paper[0] on relational databases by Edgar Codd is quite accessible.

I also loved the MOOC by Prof. Jennifer Widom[1]

[0] https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~zives/03f/cis550/codd.pdf

[1] http://online.stanford.edu/course/databases-self-paced

In addition to the great links from siblings, it might be interesting to read this Stonebraker paper on the cyclical nature of databases and how, ultimately, they all reduce to a few core paradigms. [0]

[0] http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~anhai/courses/764-sp07-anhai/datam...

This java project gives you a glimpse at how it all works. It was extracted out of a now defunkt db vendor (I think?). https://calcite.apache.org/

Yeah, it came out of the Eigenbase project. (http://luciddb.sourceforge.net/ and http://www.eigenbase.org). DB internals are indeed quite fun. (I worked on LucidDB(https://github.com/LucidDB/luciddb) for a time.)

I really liked 'Database in Depth' by C.J. Date.

anything from C. J. Date

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