Some days I feel that I’ve returned to my old DBA role, well… sort of. A lot of my day to day work revolves around a vast amount of data and applications for data storage and retrieval. I haven’t been a DBA by trade since 2011, nearly an eternity in the tech industry.
To me, Designing Data-Intensive Applications was a wonderful survey of “What’s changed?” as well as “What’s still useful?” regarding all things data. I found Designing had practical, implementable material, especially around newer document databases.
This book is a good balance of theory and practice. I particularly enjoyed the breakdown of concurrency related problems and adding concrete names to classes of issues I’ve seen in practice (e.g., phantom reads, dirty reads, etc).
The section about distributed systems theory was well done but it was a definite lull in the rest of the book’s flow.
The book’s last section and last chapter were both strong. I would recommend this book to all of my colleagues.