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Comment by itmag | Hacker News Reader

Off-topic but relevant: I've been looking for info on just how database software does what it does. Ie from parsing the SQL query to hitting the disk, and everything in between. Anyone got any links or books?

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Gray and Reuter's Transaction Processing is absolutely superb, and it covers a good part of this stack, everything lower-level than query planning. However, it covers every approach to doing this. If you want to know how Postgres, say, does it, that's a lot less information, and may be more digestible.

Thanks. I am interested in the general theory of how every database does it; it bothers me that this area of software engineering is terra incognita to me.

The sqlite source is well put together and pretty small. The (now pretty much obsolete) sqlite 2.x source was a lot smaller and might be a better starting point for pure learning purposes.

Bonus: in the sqlite command line tool, putting "EXPLAIN " before a query will dump out the VM commands that the query was converted to, without executing them.

Any decent textbook on databases would cover most of this, with the possible exception of parsing SQL. It will likely have an in-depth discussion of data structures to reduce disk access.

I strongly recommend you read one such book more or less end-to-end.

HN: As with other areas of computer science, there is often a "canonical" book, like TAOCP or CLRS on algorithms. Is there any such book for databases?

Nothing speaks like the source :) I recommend: http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/source/v9.1.2/

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