Introduction to databases. From biological to spatio-temporal (Q1049894)

This book is at first glance yet another book on databases, and hence appears to be an addition to a bookshelf that is already overfull, in particular since the title `Introduction to databases' does not even indicate a specialization. However, the subtitle `From biological to spatio-temporal' is a clear sign of what the author has in mind: a book that covers all the modern turns and directions that databases have taken in recent years. These are many: constraint, temporal, geographic, moving-objects, image, and genome databases, to name just the most important ones covered in this book. For each of these topics, the author reserves a separate chapter of between 15 and 20 pages and explains the essence of the subject, illustrated with good examples, and rounded off with appropriate bibliographical notes and a number of exercises. The treatment in each case is very readable, and uses formalism only as far as necessary (or already common in the area under discussion). A little more than (the second) half of the book is devoted to both traditional and more recent technical topics, now independent of particular application domains. On the traditional side, these include database design, indexing, evaluation of queries, and implementation methods; on the less traditional side, these include data integration, interpolation and approximation, or data visualization. The nice feature in each chapter is that Revesz never follows the path that has been taken by numerous other textbooks already, but injects fresh aspects everywhere. On the other hand, he is not afraid of making core findings available as clearly stated (and proved) theorems. Overall, this is a very valuable addition to the database textbook literature. The author claims that the primary audience for this book are undergraduates, but I believe that it can and will reach beyond that level of database education. The only aspect that is a bit bothering is the format of the book. It is huge in size (almost A4), but the pages use only a fraction of the available space. A smaller size (and price) would have been sufficient.