Book Review: The Data Access Handbook

The Data Access Handbook is an unarguably interesting read for database practitioners of various database implementations. Starting with description of trends in performance tuning to present times going right up to middleware issues and looking at data access in service oriented architectures ,the book covers most of the relevant topics of interest for working on performance issues in database applications.

The performance of the large-scale database implementations at the start of the 80s could be only understood by a few specialized experts having an understanding of the theoretical models and technicalities of respective database types. With the increase in database features and streamlining of the knowledge disseminated from the earlier database and performance tuning experts, shifted a lot of the performance factors into the middleware.

The authors describe in detail the trends in the database industry from the monolithic to networked environments, the emergence of the database middleware, the necessity of connectivity standards and various database drivers.

The shift of performance tuning efforts from the database management system itself(in earlier times),to middleware in the current times is the major focus of the book. Part of this focus includes an explanation of the database middleware before moving on to discussions on developing performance optimized applications on ODBC, JDBC and .NET.

There are some good technical reasons and tips give throughout the book for performance across database implementations Oracle, DB2, MS SQL Server, etc. There is a separate chapter given to the clearly outline the concepts of connection pooling and statement pooling and how to use them for performance advantage.

One of the effective tips given while discussing the SOA environment is implementing a data services layer that centralizes data access code as a service. Among the benefits of this is to allow the best practices for data access within a data access service to be identified and used frequently.

To summarize, the book makes a good technical read and provides a large number of suggestions and technical advise for improving the database application performance and scalability. It would be a better book if it could have covered some recent developments like the typicalities of database applications running on cloud architectures.