Refactoring Databases

Why I Picked It Up / How It Read

I picked up this book to deepen my understanding of databases in practice, and how schemas evolve. The book was structured very well, listing many scenarios for changes in the database, and with each, explaining the motivation, the steps, the required data migration if any

What I Took Away

• I really liked the structure of the book, and the categorization of the scenarios
• Emphasizing that changes should be small and incrimental sounds like a no-brainer but I assume it was not that obvious to some people as it is the case in software engineering.
• The book however is a bit old and was published before distributed databases became a thing, so, it doesn't touch on subjects like many replicas, sharding, and the algorithm explanations don't go into how to implement the change with zero downtime in a distributed system
  • I wish I could find another book with similar structure that is more recent and take these subjects into consideration.