A Review of "The Data Access Handbook: Achieving Optimal Database Application Performance and Scalability"

By John Goodson and Robert A. Steward

August, 2009
Reviewed by Michael S. Hines

About the Author
Mike Hines, Purdue University

Mike has 34 years of experience in data processing related jobs, mostly with mainframe computing. For 5 of those years he has been responsible for performance management and capacity planning at Purdue. He helped establish the first capacity planning and performance monitoring role in ADPC (now ITaP). He has served as a reviewer and session coordinator at CMG National.

Prentice-Hall, 2009
333 pp
ISBN 10: 0-13-714393-1 | ISBN 13: 978-0-13-714393-1

Once in a while you find a book that 'grabs you' and you don't want to put down until you've 'consumed it'.  I'm a fan of John Grisham and most of his books are that way, to me.  The Data Access Handbook is also one of those books.

After reading The Data Access Handbook you will get a better understanding of the complexity of the three tier client server infrastructure (Clint, Data Server, and Business Application Server).  Because of this complexity, response time, throughput and scalability problems may occur at any point in the infrastructure.

This book discusses the following relational database management systems (RDBMS): DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, and Sybase ASE.  It also discusses the following middleware connections between applications and RDBMS systems: native connections, Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), and Microsoft's ADO.NET. Last, it discusses network affects and SQL statement construction on performance.

The Data Access Handbook is an extensive reference on database access that should be on every Capacity/Performance analyst's desk - as well on every Data Base Administrator's desk and every Data Base Programmer's desk so that the many performance factors are considered at design time.  As an Engineer, I am very interested in knowing how things work.  This book brings many concepts together in one place - providing the total picture on database access.  I highly recommend it.   

Special 'thank you' to April Harned at Data Direct who arranged for MeasureIT to obtain a review copy of the book at no cost.