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Comment by dominotw | Hacker News Reader

I realized how little i knew about how databases work until I watched this lecture series. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHnBsf2rH-K7pn09rb3qvkA

Does anyone have DB internal book recommendation that inst' boring as hell.

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You might try this collection of papers about DB technology.

http://www.redbook.io/

Fair warning: this is not for beginners. If you find the going too hard, start with a DB textbook.

Also, that site doesn't seem to include the papers themselves. But most of those papers are very famous, so if you search for the titles, you should find copies. Worst case, you might need to visit a university library.

> Fair warning: this is not for beginners. If you find the going too hard, start with a DB textbook.

which one can teach how to build a DB system from scratch? I'm not talking about SQL theory or implementing a SQL parser but the actual persistence, indexing part.

Both of them, really. There's a lot to know if you want to build a modern database system. But no work I am aware of addresses the specific question of how to build a database system from scratch.

A reasonable approach might be to start with this high-level paper, and follow papers they reference until they get specific enough to address your specific questions:

    Joseph M. Hellerstein, Michael Stonebraker, James Hamilton. 
    Architecture of a Database System. Foundations and Trends in Databases, 1, 2 (2007).

For the sort of low-level issues that you are interested in, it might be useful to study a well-regarded persistence package, such as Berkeley DB.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_DB

Another system that might be worth studying is SQLite.

https://www.sqlite.org/index.html

If the Hellerstein/Stonebraker/Hamilton paper is the kind of overview you are looking for, then a better link for the SQLite equivalent is

https://sqlite.org/arch.html

After hearing DDIA (https://dataintensive.net) recommended a few times, I picked it up and have been working through it recently. The book includes an incredible amount of references that provide further reading on individual areas.

I confirm DDIA is awesome book, I would recommend to anyone working with database and distributed systems.

Transactional Information Systems: Theory, Algorithms, and the Practice of Concurrency Control and Recovery (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems) ISBN-13: 978-1558605084

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1558605088/?coliid=IYEILMZI5DVNM&c...

and

Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems) ISBN-13: 978-1558601901

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1558601902/?coliid=I2GWJZ9XJ5D4JI&...

Pro SQL Server Internals by Dmitri Korotkevitch

https://www.apress.com/gb/book/9781484219638

It's specific to MS SQL Server but I found the chapters on log file management, indexes & isolation levels to be accessible and enjoyable.

I found this one very good and easy to read:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Database-Management-Systems-Raghu-R...

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