"If you work at Amazon, you cannot use and refer to this document because of the copyright violation issues." --> This is really interesting. Does anyone know the background on this? Has anyone else seen this someplace else?
Maybe to do with amazon implementing postgres compatibility in aurora? Reading this could leave an argument that it's not a "clean-room" implementation and is a license violation.
Depending on the database, changing the storage layer might require changing almost everything: the query planner, optimizer and executioner intrinsically need to know how storage works to make queries efficient.
Aurora most definitely does not do that for Postgres. Postgres’s storage layer is separate enough that this is quite possible.
Edit: maybe the confusion here is about what “storage layer” means here. The physical row encoding is still the same. What’s different in Aurora (there are white papers on this) is how the WAL records get applied directly to encoding aware distributed as opposed to separately syncing the heap storage to disk.
I believe it's the same case for anyone that contributes to Wine. I remember a recent case, some old Windows source code was leaked and there was a discussion around this policy.
This may be a good place to ask: Are there any books that are something like "the SICP/HtDP of databases", in the sense of teaching fundamentals in a principled, mind-expanding way? Something that doesn't focus so much on internals, but on how to design and deal with data models and databases.
It's funny but I think I learned about relational database theory (normal forms and such) from the early chapters and/or appendices of thick computer books written about products like Delphi, FoxPro, and MS Access. The data-modeling knowledge scaled up really well to stand alone database servers of various kinds! It's too bad there isn't something similar for new learners, some in-the-browser environment they could enter to try out their nascent SQL skillz. Ideally something with a big thick paper book, too! (The book is a shibboleth representing stability of API and seriousness of purpose, which are too-rare qualities in today's software products.)
