Book Review: Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement

Book Review: Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement by Eric Redmond: Publisher- Pragmatic Bookshelf: ISBN- 13: 978-1934356920

Seven Databases in Seven Weeks is excellent commentary on contemporary databases. Eric’s background in database has helped in shaping the content.

Book covers seven databases which span from RDBMS to various flavours of NO SQL.

• PostgreSQL- traditional relational database;
• Riak - key-value database;
• HBase - columnar database;
• MongoDB - document-oriented database;
• CouchDB - document-oriented database;
• Neo4j - graph-oriented database, and
• Redis - key-value store.

From this list Object oriented databases are missing which seems to me OK as thier adoption is very limited and I feel they are dying specie.

The last chapters and two appendixes summaries whole book in addition of CAP theorem which add golden feather to book.

Disclaimer: I did not get paid to review this book, and I do not stand to gain anything if you buy the book. I have no relationship with the publisher or the author.

Further reading: I do not thing there is any book available which covers so many databases in so few pages.

One can get more information about book and related topics from:

1. Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Databases-Weeks-Modern-Movement/dp/1934356921

2. Publisher – Pragmatic Bookshelf: http://pragprog.com/book/rwdata/seven-databases-in-seven-weeks

3. PostgreSQL: http://www.postgresql.org

4. Riak: http://wiki.basho.com/Riak.html

5. HBase: http://hbase.apache.org

6. mongoDB: http://www.mongodb.org

7. CouchDB: http://couchdb.apache.org

8. Neo4j: http://neo4j.org

9. Redis: http://redis.io