Book Review: A Definitive Guide to Apache ShardingSphere

Thanoshan MV
3 min readJul 25, 2022

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Book Review — A Definitive Guide to Apache ShardingSphere
A Definitive Guide to Apache ShardingSphere: https://packt.link/JOeQ0

I would like to take a moment and share my thoughts with you about a book that I’ve read recently.

Apache ShardingSphere is positioned as Database Plus and an independent database middleware platform with a supportive environment that aims to create a standard ecosystem atop multi-model databases.

What is this book about?

This book is about creating and implementing a tailored version of ShardingSphere that addresses the main problems with the data management system.

ShardingSphere’s Database Plus crucial concept that paves the way for sharding, data encryption, database gateway, shadow database etc. Link, enhance and pluggable are the elements of Database Plus. Link refers to connecting with applications and databases. A nice thing about the link element is that since our application is communicating with ShardingSphere, it does not need to be aware of or adapt itself to variations in databases in the architecture. Enhance refers to enhancing the database’s ability using ShardingSphere’s features — authentication, sharding, encryption etc. Today’s industry has various unique needs and we need to cater for those requirements. This is where the pluggable element comes into play. With pluggable element, we can add our own rules and configurations according to requirements — infinite customization possibilities!

This book is made up of 3 sections consisting of 12 chapters. Listing down some of the particulars covered:

  • Fundamental difficulties that DBMS faces nowadays in production.
  • Kernel concept of the ShardingSphere.
  • Architectural elements of ShardingSphere.
  • ShardingSphere clients: ShardingSphere-JDBC and ShardingSphere-Proxy.
  • Plugin platform customization.
  • Functional and performance tests with ShardingSphere.

Each of them is explained in a detailed manner which you can refer to learn more.

Who this book is for?

This book is intended for database administrators and other professionals to incorporate distributed database solutions using Apache ShardingSphere’s features into the industry. However, if you’re interested in concepts like distributed systems, database management systems and cloud computing this book will be a great resource. I definitely recommend this book to students and beginners, like me, to learn about this great OSS, the core concepts and the people behind it.

Is the book well written?

Of course! Very well written. It explains concepts by visualizing them, repetition, and using a personalized conversational style with easy-to-understand English.

Contributors

It is my pleasure on introducing the awesome contributors to this book to you. They are Apache ShardingSphere community members and my mentors. The authors of this book are Trista Pan, Zhang Liang and Yacine Si Tayeb, PhD. The reviewers of this book are Longtao Jiang, Zhengqiang Duan, Nianjun Sun and Hongsheng Zhong.

This book is released on July 22, 2022. Check out the book on Amazon. I hope you’ll have a great time reading this book!

If you have any questions, suggestions or would like to connect with the community, you can find the community members on these channels: Twitter, LinkedIn and Slack.

Most importantly I would like to welcome you to Apache ShardingSphere’s Open Source World!

Thanks to Nivedita Singh.

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Thanoshan MV
Thanoshan MV

Written by Thanoshan MV

Hi! I'm a Software Engineer with a passion for research in AI, software engineering, and open-source development. Web - https://thanoshanmv.github.io/

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