[close] This is the one book you ought to have if you want to expand your knowledge of online transaction processing (OLTP) and learn how to apply it to the real world. Transaction Processing completely covers the problems faced by OLTP systems and discusses fault tolerance and recovery--the ability of a system to withstand failures of various kinds without dropping the ball. Additionally, Gray and Reuter cover system architecture decisions, monitoring, concurrence (including locks and isolation), scheduling (including deadlock resolution), and file systems. The book concludes with a discussion (circa 1993) of the merits of various hardware and software used in OLTP systems. Although there is no companion CD-ROM with Transaction Processing, the authors do illustrate many of the book's concepts with C source code. As this is a college textbook, you can expect some dry prose and academic approaches to certain problems. Nonetheless, the authors' writing is clear and easy to follow. [close]