SQL Performance Explained
#1820 of 2,654 all-time
SQL Performance Explained
Markus Winand
4 people recommended it in 3 threads, 2017–2025.
What people on Hacker News said
Just a killer, concise book to make you truly understand basic DB performance, specifically with indexes.
Your RDBMS has tools for finding the best optimizations in your queries and you should use them.
Your indexes are also more picky than you may think, but they're also incredibly fast if you place them correctly.
Excellent book that gets into the internals of what developers need to know about SQL and covers each part as it relates to the 4 major SQL databases (Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, MySQL)
I'd argue that today's reference to modern/advanced SQL is Markus Winand's book which isn't mentioned either.
One of the best vendor agnostic resources for understanding how databases work.
Where it comes up
- Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read? 2017 · 2 recommendations
- Ask HN: What's the best book you've read regarding software development? 2025 · 1 recommendation
- Good books for deep hacks 2017 · 1 recommendation