Keyboard shortcuts

Press ← or → to navigate between chapters

Press S or / to search in the book

Press ? to show this help

Press Esc to hide this help

Papers, Articles, Books, Courses

Per-topic papers are listed in PLAN.md. This file is the consolidated library plus foundations that span topics.

Read-first foundations

  • “Architecture of a Database System” — Hellerstein, Stonebraker, Hamilton (2007). The map of the territory. Read before topic 1.
  • Designing Data-Intensive Applications — Kleppmann. Best breadth book; ch. 3 (storage), 5, 7–9 are core.
  • Database Internals — Alex Petrov. The companion book to this whole plan (part I = topics 1–6, part II = topic 15).
  • CMU 15-445 (intro, Pavlo) and 15-721 (advanced) — lectures free on YouTube. 15-721 readings overlap heavily with PLAN.md.
  • The Redbook (Readings in Database Systems, 5th ed) — redbook.io.

Classics (by area)

  • Storage: O’Neil “LSM-Tree” ’96 · Comer “Ubiquitous B-Tree” ’79 · Graefe “Modern B-Tree Techniques” · “RUM Conjecture” ’16
  • Recovery: Mohan “ARIES” ’92 · “Aether: Scalable WAL” VLDB’10
  • Buffer/memory: “Are You Sure You Want to Use MMAP?” CIDR’22 · “LeanStore” ICDE’18 · “vmcache” SIGMOD’23
  • Transactions: Berenson “Critique of ANSI Isolation” ’95 · Kung/Robinson “Optimistic Methods for Concurrency Control” TODS’81 · “SSI in PostgreSQL” VLDB’12 · “Hekaton” SIGMOD’13 · Wu/Pavlo “In-Memory MVCC Evaluation” VLDB’17
  • Indexing: Leis “ART” ICDE’13 · “Bw-Tree” ICDE’13 + “More Than Buzz Words” SIGMOD’18
  • LSM tuning: “Monkey” SIGMOD’17 · “Dostoevsky” SIGMOD’18 · RocksDB TODS’21 · “LSM Compaction Design Space” VLDB’21
  • Query optimization: Selinger “Access Path Selection” ’79 · “How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really?” VLDB’15 · Graefe “Cascades” ’95
  • Execution: “MonetDB/X100” CIDR’05 · “Compiled vs Vectorized” VLDB’18 · “Morsel-Driven Parallelism” SIGMOD’14 · Neumann “HyPer compilation” VLDB’11
  • Columnar: “C-Store” VLDB’05 · “Compression + Execution in Column Stores” SIGMOD’06 · “BtrBlocks” SIGMOD’23 · “FSST” VLDB’20
  • Graph: Davis “SuiteSparse:GraphBLAS” TOMS · “Kùzu” CIDR’23 · “EmptyHeaded” · Ngo et al. worst-case optimal joins · LDBC SNB spec
  • Vector/ANN: “HNSW” arXiv:1603.09320 · Jégou “Product Quantization” PAMI’11 · “DiskANN” NeurIPS’19
  • Distributed: “Raft” ATC’14 · “Viewstamped Replication Revisited” · “Spanner” OSDI’12 · “Percolator” OSDI’10 · “Calvin” SIGMOD’12
  • Testing: “SQLancer/PQS” OSDI’20 · “TLP” OOPSLA’20 · Jepsen analyses (jepsen.io/analyses)
  • Perspective: “OLTP Through the Looking Glass” SIGMOD’08 · “What’s Really New with NewSQL?” ’16

Modern systems & directions (post-2015, dbscholar-audited)

Cross-checked 2026-07-12 against Ryan Marcus’s citation-PageRank ranking (https://rmarcus.info/dbscholar — SIGMOD/VLDB/CIDR/PODS citation graph; the old blog post is https://rmarcus.info/blog/2023/07/25/papers.html). Everything below is either linked from a topic README or listed here:

  • Query optimization, learned: Kipf “Learned Cardinalities” CIDR’19 · “Neo” VLDB’19 · Marcus “Bao” SIGMOD’21 (→ topic 10)
  • Planner/executor as libraries: “Apache Calcite” SIGMOD’18 · “Velox” VLDB’22 (→ topics 10, 11)
  • Engines: “Photon” SIGMOD’22 · “Umbra” CIDR’20 · “DuckDB” SIGMOD’19 demo + CIDR’20 (→ topics 6, 11, 19)
  • Cloud: “Aurora” SIGMOD’17 · “Snowflake” SIGMOD’16 · “Socrates” SIGMOD’19 · “Lakehouse” CIDR’21 + “Delta Lake” VLDB’20 · “CockroachDB” SIGMOD’20 (→ topics 28, 29)
  • Columnar/nested: “Dremel” VLDB’10 (→ topic 12) · “ClickHouse” VLDB’24
  • Streaming: “MillWheel” VLDB’13 · “DBSP” VLDB’23 (→ topic 27)
  • Time-series: “Gorilla” VLDB’15 · “Monarch” VLDB’20 (→ topic 30)
  • HTAP: “TiDB” VLDB’20 · “F1 Lightning” VLDB’20 (→ topic 32)
  • Learned indexes: Kraska “The Case for Learned Index Structures” SIGMOD’18 → PGM → ALEX (→ topic 26)
  • Graph query languages: “Graph Pattern Matching in GQL and SQL/PGQ” SIGMOD’22 · “G-CORE” SIGMOD’18 (→ topic 13)

arXiv monitoring

Interesting recent arXiv finds go here with a one-line why. Search these when starting a topic:

  • cs.DB new submissions: https://arxiv.org/list/cs.DB/recent
  • Queries that pay off: “learned index”, “LSM compaction”, “vector search filtering”, “cardinality estimation deep learning”, “worst-case optimal join”

Blogs & talks worth following

  • Andy Pavlo (databases yearly review) · CedarDB blog · DuckDB blog · turso blog (DST posts)
  • Justin Jaffray (query engines) · Phil Eaton (eatonphil.com — builds DBs from scratch)
  • Marc Brooker (AWS, distributed systems) · antithesis.com blog (DST)
  • Jepsen analyses · valkey engineering blog · qdrant tech blog