Review book Database Reliability Engineer

27 Mar 2018 · Two minute read · on Gianluca's blog

The author of Database Reliability Engineer are Laine Campbell, Charity Majors. It is published by O’Reilly. You can buy it on Amazon.

You probably know the book Site Reliability Engineer, if you don’t I reviewed it a few days ago.

This book walks the same experience but focused on databases. I work for InfluxData as SRE and I deal every days with databases running on our Cloud Product so I am in that topic but now because I am good as DBA but just as a developer with a background on distributed system and cloud computing.

It doesn’t really matter if you manage databases as DBA or if you use it as a developer this book contains useful contents for both categories.

It is a dance book, I started it ready it few months ago and at some point I spotted, just because it contains too many notions and experiences and it requires some time to metabolize them.

I particularly enjoyed the Chapter 7 about Backup and Recovery. But also Chapter 3 about about Risk Management is great because it goes deeper on how metrics should drive your way to look at risks and outage.

My daily job is all around database orchestration, containers and so on. So I found this book very useful for my day to day job and it enforced the expectation that I had about the application that I am building.

I will try to go deeper on backup management to make the recovery part of a more structure pipeline to be sure that it is always usable for example.

It is a very practical book based and you can fill all the enthusiasm and the experiences made by the two authors Charity and Laine. If you are happy to learn from who has its hands dirty this book is your book. It drives you an story and less learned.

How to manage migration and how to fill the gap between developer and DBA because they are both the same goals the success of the company and the project.

If we can keep both on the same loop avoiding backstabbing we will increase our chance of success. If you are a manages and you see some friction in your teams, this book can give you some good feedback.

Something weird with this website? Let me know.