Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems - Martin Kleppmann

GoodReads Summary: Data is at the center of many challenges in system design today. Difficult issues need to be figured out, such as scalability, consistency, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability. In addition, we have an overwhelming variety of tools, including relational databases, NoSQL datastores, stream or batch processors, and message brokers. What are the right choices for your application? How do you make sense of all these buzzwords?

In this practical and comprehensive guide, author Martin Kleppmann helps you navigate this diverse landscape by examining the pros and cons of various technologies for processing and storing data. Software keeps changing, but the fundamental principles remain the same. With this book, software engineers and architects will learn how to apply those ideas in practice, and how to make full use of data in modern applications.

First off, right out of the bat: If you want to design Data Intensive Applications, this is not the book you're looking for. This book goes greats lengths to explain how already existing Data Intensive Applications work -- say, how Zookeeper works when synching data, how Cassandra works without a leader, how PostgreSQL do transactions and so on.

While informative, the biggest problem is that most of the text is very loaded: there are layers and layers on each paragraph and you'll take a long time putting it all together.

Personaly, I felt it lacked examples. Sure, it's interesting how many ways you can do leader election, but which databases use this or that way? I can see that one way is the way I want to build my applications on top, but without a really good example, where should I look?

Also, there is a slight tendency to describe the "market winners" in way more detail than everything else. There are long discussions about the ways Cassandra solves its problems than Voldermort (obviously, there is a reason why Cassandra is the market winner, but this "over-focus" on certain applications is tiring and just do a job on keeping those on top -- because that's the ones the book talks and who will look at a database called Voldermort when you mention it just in passing?)

Overall, it felt like reading my old "Operating Systems 101" books again -- in a theorical way, not productive way.