Well Rounded Book That Does the Job

I bought this book as a required text for a class I was taking. While I find text books dry and difficult in many cases, this one was different. Mullen writes with some well placed humor, and yet covers a very large spectrum of information.

This is not light reading, and it goes into quite a bit of depth on the various topics that a DBA needs to know, like backup and recovery or indexing. He doesn't get into how you mechanically do the procedure on each DBMS, but rather, he goes for an under the hood approach, so that you understand how/why the DBMS works. After each chapter he gives very good references for additional reading on each topic.

Even though Mullen is a DB2 guy, this is not a DB2 book, it is well rounded non-platform specific. While some books can be TOO generic and not useful, the author treads a delicate balance and delivers value in every chapter of the book.

One final note, he does convert real life experience into this text and I really appreciated the information he provided on denormalization and some other aspects that are not covered by other books.

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