Bibliography & Resources

Sources, references, and recommended reading cited throughout Database Fundamentals, organized by topic. Most are freely available online; books are noted.

Foundational papers

  • Codd, E. F. (1970). A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks. Communications of the ACM. — The paper that founded the relational model. (Ch. 1, 3, 4)
  • Chen, P. (1976). The Entity-Relationship Model — Toward a Unified View of Data. — Introduced ER modeling. (Ch. 17)
  • Berenson et al. (1995). A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels. — Clarifies isolation phenomena. (Ch. 26)
  • Brewer, E. Towards Robust Distributed Systems (CAP conjecture); "CAP Twelve Years Later." (Ch. 35)

Books

  • Kleppmann, M. Designing Data-Intensive Applications (O'Reilly). The essential modern text on data systems — models, storage, consistency, distribution. Referenced across Parts IV–VII.
  • Kimball, R. & Ross, M. The Data Warehouse Toolkit. Dimensional modeling / star schemas. (Ch. 34)
  • Date, C. J. An Introduction to Database Systems / Database in Depth. Rigorous relational theory. (Ch. 3, 19)
  • Ramakrishnan, R. & Gehrke, J. Database Management Systems. Academic standard (theory, internals). (Ch. 4, 19, 24)
  • Silberschatz, Korth & Sudarshan. Database System Concepts. University course text. (Ch. 3, 4)
  • Elmasri, R. & Navathe, S. Fundamentals of Database Systems. Comprehensive (ER/EER, normalization). (Ch. 17–19)
  • Beaulieu, A. Learning SQL (O'Reilly). Friendly SQL introduction. (Part II)
  • DeBarros, A. Practical SQL (No Starch). Hands-on, PostgreSQL-based. (Part II)
  • Winand, M. SQL Performance Explained. Indexing and performance. (Ch. 23–24)
  • Celko, J. SQL for Smarties / Trees and Hierarchies in SQL for Smarties. Patterns, hierarchies. (Ch. 21)
  • Fowler, M. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. Inheritance mapping, polymorphism, polyglot persistence. (Ch. 18, 21, 37)
  • Obe, R. & Hsu, L. PostgreSQL: Up and Running. PostgreSQL specifics.

PostgreSQL documentation (free, authoritative)

  • PostgreSQL Official Documentation — https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ — the definitive reference for every feature: Tutorial, Queries, Data Types, Functions, Indexes, Concurrency Control (MVCC/isolation/locking), Performance Tips, Server Administration, Backup and Restore, Internals, WAL, and more. Cited in nearly every chapter.
  • PostgreSQL release notes — read yearly to stay current. (Ch. 40)

Online resources

  • Markus Winand — use-the-index-luke.com (free). The clearest guide to indexing and query performance. (Ch. 23–24)
  • "The Internals of PostgreSQL" (interdb.jp), Hironobu Suzuki (free). Illustrated internals — pages, buffer manager, WAL, MVCC, VACUUM. (Ch. 28)
  • Rogov, E. PostgreSQL Internals (free PDF). Book-length internals. (Ch. 28)
  • explain.depesz.com / explain.dalibo.com — visualize EXPLAIN plans. (Ch. 24)
  • pgexercises.com, Mode SQL Tutorial, SQLZoo, StrataScratch, DataLemur — SQL practice. (Part II, Ch. 40)
  • OWASP — Top Ten & SQL Injection Prevention Cheat Sheet. Security. (Ch. 29, 32)
  • Stack Overflow Developer Survey (database section) — practitioner usage/sentiment. (Ch. 1)

Tools & extensions

  • psql, pg_dump/pg_restore, pg_basebackup (bundled). (Ch. 2, 38)
  • pgAdmin, DBeaver, dbdiagram.io — GUIs / diagramming. (Ch. 2, 17)
  • PgBouncer, pgBackRest/Barman, Patroni, pg_cron — pooling, backups, HA, scheduling. (Ch. 27, 35, 38)
  • Extensions: pg_stat_statements, pgAudit, PostGIS, pgvector, TimescaleDB, Citus, pg_trgm, hstore. (Ch. 16, 24, 25, 32, 34, 36)
  • psycopg2 / psycopg3, SQLAlchemy, Alembic — Python access, ORM, migrations. (Ch. 22, 29, 30)
  • dbt, Flyway, Liquibase — transformations and migrations. (Ch. 22, 31, 34)

Adjacent / NoSQL & specialized (for Part VI)

  • MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra, Neo4j documentation — the NoSQL families. (Ch. 33)
  • Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, DuckDB, ClickHouse — analytical databases. (Ch. 34)
  • CockroachDB, YugabyteDB, Google Spanner (paper) — NewSQL / distributed SQL. (Ch. 35)
  • Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus, Qdrant; Elasticsearch — vector / search. (Ch. 36)

This book is licensed CC-BY-SA-4.0. Sources above are the work of their respective authors; consult them directly for depth beyond this book.