An Academic Useful Guide on Databases

Today I have a different kind of eBook. It is an academic Guide on Databases. It is easy and simple to understand majority of the chapters. The academic eBook titled as "The Dummies' Guide to Database Systems: An Assembly of Information. An Easy to Understand Guide Even for Laypeople" is authored by me.

The book title is intentionally ambiguous. Why? Because Database Systems are themselves a collection/assembly of information while the book is an assembly of information from various resources. The title carries a third meaning that it is open to anybody interested in databases, just about any layperson. Why? Because majority of the chapters have been written with that purpose in mind, in an easy to understand manner. 

The book starts introducing ideas of backend and front end of database systems and covers why databases are at all useful. It goes on to explain the basics of Entity Relationship model (ERM), the fundamental step in designing databases at the backend. The book explains how to convert ERMs to relational models (table schemas), and introduces relational algebra, a pure and procedural form of language to query databases. It also covers Structured Query Language (SQL), the most widely used user-friendly language used for querying relational databases and retrieving info. 

It includes other aspects of database design like integrity constraints (conditions) that can be imposed on relational systems, and also includes functional dependencies among attributes (fields) of a table, and the concept of normalization (Chapter 6). The next chapters mainly cover query processing which is the series of activities involved in extracting data from a database, and also cover why the need to map databases to files may arise and how. 

The following chapters give a short explanation of a data dictionary and what info about databases it contains, and include sophisticated indexing techniques for files. Just as words or phrases in a textbook index appear in a sorted order, an index for a file in a database works in a similar way.

The book next covers the concept of transactions which are a sequence of data access operations that transfers the database from one consistent state to another consistent state, and introduces concurrency control which rectifies the problems occurring if two or more transactions using the same data items are executed in parallel. 

The final chapter includes advanced databases covering distributed databases, data warehouses, multimedia databases and data mining in brief, as well as introduction to NoSQL (Not Only SQL) environment.There is also a miscellaneous database project at the very end which students and/or the readers can work on through out the whole semester in parallel with theory lectures (or in their spare times for those who are not students). 

It is my pleasure to be able to write a book like this which should not only be educational and informative but also an enjoyable and productive read at the same time. I wish you all the very best on your merry reading through the pages of this valuable and enriching book. 

Please visit the following link to grab a free complimentary copy of the eBook: 

The Dummies' Guide to Database Systems: An Assembly of Information. An Easy to Understand Guide Even for Laypeople

All the best,

Rosie