The Definitive Guide to Berkeley DB XML
Wow – someone wrote a book about something I made – that’s such a nice feeling.
I met Rex Wang at Sleepycat/Oracle for lunch this week and he very kindly gave me a copy. I’m mentioned in the acknowledgements as instigator of the dbxml project and my company Parthenon gets a mention too for its contribution to the Pathan XPath Processor.
Danny Brian has done a great job of capturing the essense of what we at Sleepycat were trying to achieve. It’s quite strange to see all those tiny decisions commited to printed page. Both the good decisions and also the bad decisions. Which are good and which are bad I’ll leave to the reader, but I find seeing my own debug output enshrined in the query plan output to be quite amusing. I really should have some up with something more elegant.
Finally, the work of George Fienberg at Sleepycat and John Snelson at Parthenon, who took over the reigns from me, really shines through, especially in the interactive shell and the node level storage. The node level storage allows for huge document storage and for some very neat query optimizations. It seems obvious, but is in fact a tremendous feat of engineering.
