Before I worked in a large company which has its own DBAs. Yes I know SQL,I know Stored Procedures and I think I know something about indexes, but for database performance tuning, we always delegate the task to the DBA. And currently I work in a small company which doesn’t have a specific DBA role, so developers have to be DBA (Full Stack right?). So for learning something about database performance tuning, I bought this book. Oh I really love it and I learned so many things in one week!

This book talks about indexes and only one type of indexes: B-Tree. It firstly starts with the basics of index and the WHERE clause. And then proceed to join, clustering, sorting and grouping, and also partial results and modifying data. After reading this book, you should have a firm understanding how indexes work and I’m sure that this is needed for every Rails developer. As I totally agree the author’s claim, that SQL performance tuning is not just a DBA task but a developer’s task, as the performance is related to business logic and only developers understand that. And also we should think performance from design, and it’s not an afterthought.