Relational DBMS Internals

The preface to the previous edition of this book in Italian of 2001 starts with “After ten years of the publication of the book Databases: structures and algorithms, the evolution of the technology of databases and the new organization of university teaching suggest a substantial revision of the material.” Today, another reason that suggested to review the material, and to write it in English, has been the internationalisation of the master’s degree programs offered by the Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa, which have the participa- tion of students with different backgrounds who have had an introductory course in databases in different universities. Consequently, the goal in writing this new shorter edition of the textbook is to focus on the basic concepts of classical centralized DBMS implementation. Database systems occupy a central position in our information-based society, and computer scientist and database application designers should have a good knowledge about both the theoretical and the engineering concepts that underline these systems to ensure the desired application performance. The book starts with an analysis of relational DBMS architecture and then presents the main structures and algorithms to implement the modules for the management of permanent memory, the buffer, the storage structures, the access methods, the transactions and recovery, the concurrency, the cost-based query optimization. Finally, an overview of physical database design and tuning is presented.