What This Book Is Not

Before reading this book, you should know what it won’t cover.

This Is Not an Installation Guide

Installing the databases in this book is sometimes easy, sometimes a bit of a challenge, and sometimes downright frustrating. For some databases, you’ll be able to use stock packages or tools such as apt-get (on many Linux systems) or Homebrew (if you’re a Mac OS user) and for others you may need to compile from source. We’ll point out some useful tips here and there, but by and large you’re on your own. Cutting out installation steps allows us to pack in more useful examples and a discussion of concepts, which is what you really came for anyway, right?

Administration Manual? We Think Not

In addition to installation, this book will also not cover everything you’d find in an administration manual. Each of these databases offers myriad options, settings, switches, and configuration details, most of which are well covered online in each database’s official documentation and on forums such as StackOverflow. We’re much more interested in teaching you useful concepts and providing full immersion than we are in focusing on the day-to-day operations. Though the characteristics of the databases can change based on operational settings—and we discuss these characteristics in some chapters—we won’t be able to go into all the nitty-gritty details of all possible configurations. There simply isn’t space!

A Note to Windows Users

This book is inherently about choices, predominantly open source software on *nix platforms. Microsoft environments tend to strive for an integrated environment, which limits many choices to a smaller predefined set. As such, the databases we cover are open source and are developed by (and largely for) users of *nix systems. This is not our own bias so much as a reflection of the current state of affairs.

Consequently, our tutorial-esque examples are presumed to be run in a *nix shell. If you run Windows and want to give it a try anyway, we recommend setting up Bash on Windows^[1] or Cygwin^[2] to give you the best shot at success. You may also want to consider running a Linux virtual machine.