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Comment by nimrody | Hacker News Reader

Could you recommend something more appropriate for someone who would like to explore the world of database implementations?

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For an overview of basic concepts in DB implementation, I quite like Database Systems: The Complete Book (By Widom I think...). You could do a lot worse than An Introduction to Database Systems (CJ Date), although many dislike his opinionated style :-).

If you're talking about actually implementing a full transactional database system, strong foundational books are:

Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques (Gray and Reuter)

Transactional Information Systems: Theory, Algorithms, and the Practice of Concurrency Control and Recovery (Vossen and Weikum)

Neither are exactly easy reading, but the concepts therein are really important.

+1 on all of those books. If you are interested in multi-dimensional indices (R-Trees, M-Trees, and many more exotic ones). You should checkout "Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures" by Hanan Samet. Very comprehensive! "Database Systems: The Complete Book" is fantastic (pick up the previous version it is cheaper!) but it only touches on multidimensional indexing.

Also if you are interested in B-Trees start with "The Ubiquitous B-Tree" by Comer. [ http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/356770.356776 ].

"Architecture of Database Systems" by Hellerstein, Stonebraker, and Hamilton is a pretty good starting place: http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/fntdb07-architecture.pdf

I like Silberchatz et al. Pretty rigorous but practical:

http://codex.cs.yale.edu/avi/db-book/db6/slide-dir/

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