It's also pretty easy to build your own basic in-memory database if you have time/interest to show yourself these characteristics through experiment. And doing it experimentally ingrains the concepts better than just reading about it IMO.
Do you have any relevant articles?
It's written in Kotlin and is very intelligible + succinct (99 pages):
https://leanpub.com/how-query-engines-work
https://github.com/andygrove/how-query-engines-work
As a self-assessment, I rewrote the entire implementation from a columnar/vector-based engine (it uses Arrow) to row-based, using JDBC types, and it took me only 2 readthroughs of the book to be able to do that.
There's also "Database Design and Implementation" by Edward Sciore