3 Must-Read Books About Database Performance

SQL Performance Explained: Everything Developers Need to Know about SQL Performance

An in-depth book on how to improve database performance. The focus is on relational databases and it covers all major SQL databases without getting lost in the details of any one specific product. Starting with the basics of indexing and the WHERE clause, SQL Performance Explained guides developers through all parts of an SQL statement and explains the pitfalls of object-relational mapping (ORM) tools like Hibernate.

PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance

An excellent book for intermediate to advanced PostgreSQL database administrators (DBA). Teaches everything about building, monitoring and maintaining a PostgreSQL installation while also providing useful and interesting information about database internals. If you truly want to understand how PostgreSQL operates and behaves under a high load this is a book for you.

High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, and Replication

Advanced techniques for everything from designing schemas, indexes, and queries to tuning your MySQL server, operating system, and hardware to their fullest potential. This guide also teaches you safe and practical ways to scale applications through replication, load balancing, high availability, and failover.

Favorite Relational Database

Last week we conducted a small research in the form of a poll: "What is your favorite RDBMS?". The poll received more responses than anticipated – a little bit over 900 votes were submitted. The topic in question can induce flame wars, but this time it passed without major incidents. There were several attempts to vote for MongoDB, which is not a relational database management system, so we had to remove it from results. MongoDB is often considered a contentious subject when speaking in context of relational databases. To put in redditor's day_cq sarcastic words:

"mongodb all the way. full web scale power. i think mongodb should be written in nodejs to take advantage of event driven nature of fast web scale loop. and gruntjs and lessc and uglifyjs adds full power to angulrjs real time web scale RDBMS."

If you don't see a chart below, please view it here: Favorite relational database management system. Full results are shared publicly and we would like to invite you to create your own representation of the data.



Thank you all for participating!

Update: Tyson Hollas has submitted a better representation of the data. See the chart below.

Poll: What is Your RDBMS of Choice?

We have created a new poll to learn your favorite relational database management systems.

Poll: What is Your RDBMS of Choice?

Voting ends on Friday and results will be published soon after that in Database Friends blog. Stay tuned!