Book
Database Reliability Engineering
Designing and Operating Resilient Database Systems
Laine Campbell, Charity Majors
Summary
Laine Campbell and Charity Majors apply site reliability engineering, treating infrastructure as replaceable rather than individually nursed, to the one layer teams usually exempt from that treatment: the database. The book works from service-level objectives and risk management through operational visibility, infrastructure engineering, backup and recovery, and release management, then surveys storage, indexing, and replication across different datastore types, closing with a field guide for comparing datastore characteristics. The argument throughout is that data stores can be made resilient and observable through the same engineering discipline already applied to stateless services, not through heroics from a single DBA.
Target Readers
- SREs extending reliability engineering practices to the database layer they've historically treated as too fragile to touch
- DBAs moving from a caretaking role toward automated, SLO-driven operations
- Architects designing backup, replication, and zero-downtime migration strategy for a production data store
Tags
Colophon
- Publisher
- O'Reilly Japan
- ISBN
- 978-4873119403
- Published
- Apr 2021
- List price
- ¥3,740incl. taxMay differ from the actual selling price on Amazon
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Prerequisites
- Recommended
PostgreSQL Tettei Nyumon, 4th Edition (A Thorough Introduction to PostgreSQL)
From Installation to Features and Internals, Application Building, and Administration and Operations
Yuta Kondo, Yuta Masano, Kiyoshi Sakai, Tatsuhito Kasahara, Tatsuo Ishii, et al.
Reason: After covering the operational basics of PostgreSQL—backups, monitoring, transactions—the next stage is elevating them into organized, systematic operational discipline. 'Database Reliability Engineering' (by Laine Campbell and Charity Majors) applies the SRE principles systematized by Google to database operations, moving you from ad-hoc operations to SLO-based reliability design.
- Recommended
Database Internals
A Deep Dive into How Distributed Data Systems Work
Alex Petrov
Reason: Understanding the internals of storage engines and replication lets you predict, from structure, what to monitor and what can break in production. 'Database Reliability Engineering' bridges that internal knowledge into operational design—capacity planning, incident response, data integrity.
- Recommended
PostgreSQL Jissen Nyumon (A Practical Introduction to PostgreSQL)
Architecture, Operations Monitoring, and Performance Improvement
NTT Open Source Software Center
Reason: After acquiring hands-on operational procedures for a single product—replication, backup/restore, monitoring, performance tuning—you will want to place them within an organizational reliability framework. 'Database Reliability Engineering' covers SLO-based risk management and zero-downtime migration, offering a lens to re-situate individual operational techniques within SRE principles.
- Related
Designing Data-Intensive Applications
The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems
Martin Kleppmann
Reason: After understanding the theoretical trade-offs of distributed systems in Kleppmann's 'Designing Data-Intensive Applications', step into the reality of keeping them running. Based on Google's SRE principles, 'Database Reliability Engineering' (by Laine Campbell and Charity Majors) provides concrete practices for operating distributed data infrastructure reliably in production.
Next Books
- Related
Refactoring Databases
Evolutionary Database Design
Scott W. Ambler, Pramod J. Sadalage
Reason: After learning the principles of 'don't break it' operations in 'Database Reliability Engineering', the question becomes how to uphold them when you actually change the schema. The zero-downtime migration techniques in 'Refactoring Databases' form a parallel reference that translates SRE-style reliability goals into concrete schema-change procedures.