Ask HN: Must knows and resources for intermediate DBAs?

1 point

14 years ago

I'm currently working on becoming a better database developer, and I realized that I'm not fully aware of what the core concepts behind them should be. The reason why I want to gather a solid set of resources for this topic is because I just recently ran across use-the-index-luke.com, which does an excellent job at explaining the concepts behind B-tree indexes and the subtleties involved in working with them.

I was hoping that there might be equally extensive and exhaustive resources out there (they can be (e-)books you have to pay for, although free is always welcome) for other topics, such as:

- creating schema that's performant and not too nightmarish to extend/maintain

- scale

- migrations

- minimizing downtime for a running system when modifying the schema

- performance optimization

- understand no-sql and when to use it (actually I know the answer to this one: "7 databases in 7 weeks" by Pragmatic Bookshelf claims to answer that question)

- ... whatever else is imporatnt

I'm absolutely confident that you could write books on any of these topics, however the level of depth I'm interested is purely pragmatic: whatever a good developer needs to know to get the most bang for his buck and no time spent on the more esoteric fine-tuning.

Any recommendations? Online resources that worked great for you? Books? If RDBMS flavor matters, let's assume I'm talking about PostgreSQL.

Thanks!