This book has no discussion or topic regarding any comercial vendor technologies (specially databases), and I think this is very good. The Page and Object models for transaction processing are clearly explained. There's a very nice discussion concerning RAID technologies.
This is not an 'academic' book in all the sense of the word. It can help IT professionals to make better transactional system desing (databases, workflow,e-business,etc).
I would like some RDBMS vendors will include this kind of theory in their documentation....
This book changes that by going far beyond transaction processing. It starts with the same fundamentals as the older book, and even covers many of the same topics, such as concurrency control, but it addresses each topic from a much wider perspective. For example, the discussion of concurrency goes far beyond the issues of transaction processing as a middleware component. It extends into application, database and search issues. Another indication that this book is more up-to-date is the material on queue managers. While they are at the opposite end of the spectrum from transaction processing monitors, they are integral to any discussion of transactional information systems. More importantly, both transaction processing monitors and queue managers are used in modern enterprise architectures. Having both topics discussed in great detail is a major point in this book's favor.
Personally I intend to keep my copy of the older "Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques" because it does cover some of the subject matter more deeply. However, this book has replaced it as my principal reference and if I had to choose between them this is the one I'd go with.
Transactional Information Systems is the long-awaited, comprehensive work from leading scientists in the transaction processing field. Weikum and Vossen begin with a broad look at the role of transactional technology in today's economic and scientific endeavors, then delve into critical issues faced by all practitioners, presenting today's most effective techniques for controlling concurrent access by multiple clients, recovering from system failures, and coordinating distributed transactions.
The authors emphasize formal models that are easily applied across fields, that promise to remain valid as current technologies evolve, and that lend themselves to generalization and extension in the development of new classes of network-centric, functionally rich applications. This book's purpose and achievement is the presentation of the foundations of transactional systems as well as the practical aspects of the field what will help you meet today's challenges. * Provides the most advanced coverage of the topic available anywhere--along with the database background required for you to make full use of this material.* Explores transaction processing both generically as a broadly applicable set of information technology practices and specifically as a group of techniques for meeting the goals of your enterprise.* Contains information essential to developers of Web-based e-Commerce functionality--and a wide range of more "traditional" applications.* Details the algorithms underlying core transaction processing functionality.