Appendices

Appendix M. Further Reading and References

Where to go after this book: the primary sources, the standard texts, the platform documentation, and the practitioner literature — organized by the book's parts, with one line on why each matters.

Primary sources (the papers that started it)

E. F. Codd, "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks," Communications of the ACM, 1970 — the founding paper; readable in an afternoon, foundational forever (Chapter 2).
E. F. Codd, "Relational Completeness of Data Base Sublanguages," 1972 — the algebra/calculus equivalence (Chapter 3).
Peter Chen, "The Entity-Relationship Model — Toward a Unified View of Data," ACM TODS, 1976 — the ER model (Chapter 5).
Donald Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce, "SEQUEL: A Structured English Query Language," 1974 — SQL's origin (Chapter 8).
Jim Gray and Andreas Reuter, Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques, 1993 — the transactions bible behind Chapter 18.
Hal Berenson et al., "A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels," 1995 — the modern, precise isolation-level definitions (Chapter 18's anomalies, properly).
C. J. Date, An Introduction to Database Systems, 8th ed. — the classic theoretical companion to Part I.

Standard textbooks (the classroom canon)

Abraham Silberschatz, Henry Korth, and S. Sudarshan, Database System Concepts — the broadest standard text; strongest on Chapters 3–7 and 18's formal treatment.
Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems — the ER-to-normalization arc of Part II in fullest form.
Thomas Connolly and Carolyn Begg, Database Systems — a strong design-and-lifecycle alternative.
Raghu Ramakrishnan and Johannes Gehrke, Database Management Systems — the query-processing and optimization theory behind Chapter 19.

PostgreSQL

The PostgreSQL Documentation (postgresql.org/docs) — the manual, and a famously good one; Part IV's chapters assume it is bookmarked.
The PostgreSQL Wiki — performance, tuning, and FAQ material maintained by the community.
Bruce Momjian, PostgreSQL: Up and Running — the practitioner's orientation.
pgvector, PostGIS, and pg_stat_statements documentation — the extension ecosystem of Chapter 27.

MySQL

The MySQL Reference Manual (dev.mysql.com/doc) — especially the InnoDB chapter (Chapter 16's source) and the optimization chapter (Chapter 19).
High Performance MySQL, Baron Schwartz et al. — the operational MySQL book; the monitoring and indexing chapters deepen Part V.
MySQL Server Team blog and Planet MySQL — engine-level news (online DDL, histograms, the query-cache removal).

SQL craft and performance

Markus Winand, SQL Performance Explained — "Use The Index, Luke!" in book form; the indexing chapters of 19, sharpened to a point.
Joe Celko, SQL for Smarties and Thinking in Sets — advanced SQL as a mindset; the natural sequel to Part III.
Itzik Ben-Gan, T-SQL Fundamentals / window-function deep dives — the best window-function teaching in print (platform-specific, transferable).
Use The Index, Luke (use-the-index-luke.com) — the free online indexing tutorial.

Data warehousing

Ralph Kimball and Margy Ross, The Data Warehouse Toolkit — dimensional modeling's source (Chapter 25).
Bill Inmon, Building the Data Warehouse — the other founding definition (25.2).
ClickHouse and DuckDB documentation — the columnar rungs of the analytics ladder.

Distributed systems and applications

Martin Kleppmann, Designing Data-Intensive Applications — the book Part VI–VII's judgment echoes; replication, partitioning, consistency, and the storage landscape.
Eric Brewer's CAP talks/papers and the Gilbert–Lynch proof — Chapter 26's theory, from the source.
Database Reliability Engineering (Campbell & Ginter) — the DBA-as-engineering book behind Chapter 21's calendar.

Security and governance

OWASP SQL Injection Prevention Cheat Sheet — Chapter 20's law, as a checklist.
The GDPR text and your jurisdiction's analog — Chapter 27.6's obligations, primary-sourced.
PostgreSQL's pgaudit and MySQL's Enterprise Audit documentation.

The platforms' own histories

"The Design of Postgres" lineage papers (Stonebraker et al.) — how the research project became Chapter 15's engine.
MySQL 8.0: what's new (MySQL manual appendix) — the release that made window functions, CTEs, and CHECK enforcement part of this book's teachable core.

How to read from here

The sequence this book suggests: pick your platform's manual (B or C) as your constant companion; read SQL Performance Explained next (it pays back Part V directly); then branch — Chen and Codd's papers if the theory pulled you, Kimball if the warehouse did, Kleppmann if the systems questions did. And keep Chapter 30's standard wherever you go: predicted, verified, documented.