Basic Textbooks

• Database Systems: The Complete Book; Garcia-Molina, Ullman, and Widom: all chapters

Query Processing, Parallel & Distributed Databases

• Query Optimization; Ioannidis, Handbook for Computer Science chapter 45 (CRC Press) (postscript)
• Parallel Database Systems: The Future of High-Performance Database Processing; DeWitt and Gray, CACM 35(6), 1992 (pdf)
• The State of the Art in Distributed Query Processing; Kossman, ACM Computing Surveys 32(4), 2000

Transaction Management and Concurrency Control

• Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems; Bernstein, Hadjilacos, and Goodman: chapters 1, 2, 3.1-3.12, 4.1-4.2, 5.1, 5.3-5.4, 6, 7, 8 (link)
• ARIES: A Transaction Recovery Method Supporting Fine-Granularity Locking and Partial Rollbacks Using Write-Ahead Logging; Mohan et al., Readings in Database Systems (3rd edition) pp. 251-285

Benchmarks

• A Measure of Transaction Processing Power; Anon et al., Readings in Database Systems (3rd edition) pp. 609-621
• New TPC Benchmarks for Decision Support and Web Comerce; Poess and Floyd, SIGMOD Record 29(4), December 2000

Database Theory

• Lecture Notes on Principles of Database Systems; Ullman (link): Sections on Theory of Dependencies, Logic as a Database Language, Conjunctive Queries, Information Integration Systems, and Magic-sets and Deductive Database Systems (first three bullets)
• Foundations of Databases; Abiteboul, Hull and Vianu: chapter 19 (incomplete information) (link)
• Answering Queries Using Views: A Survey; Levy, VLDB Journal, 10(4) (postscript)

Data Warehousing and Mining

• An Overview of Data Warehousing and OLAP Technology; Chaudhuri and Dayal, SIGMOD Record 26(1), March 1997
• Implementing Data Cubes Efficiently; Harinarayanan, Rajaraman, and Ullman, SIGMOD 1996
• Lecture Notes on Data Mining; Ullman (link): In "Data Mining" table: Association Rules, A-Priori Algorithm, Other Frequent-Pair Algorithms, Correlated Items, Clustering Parts I and II

XML, Text, and Web

• XQuery: an XML Query Language; D. Chamberlin, IBM Systems Journal 41(4), 2002 (pdf)
• Managing Gigabytes; Witten, Moffat, and Bell: chapter 5. Hardcopy available.
• The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web; Page, Brin, Motwani, and Winograd (link)
• Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment; Kleinberg, Journal of the ACM 46, 1999

Miscellaneous Topics, New Directions

• Advanced Database Systems; Zaniolo, Ceri, et al.: chapter 11 (spatial and text indexing)
• Similarity Search in High Dimensions via Hashing; Gionis, Indyk, and Motwani, VLDB 1999
• Distinct Sampling for Highly Accurate Answers to Distinct Values Queries and Event Reports; Gibbons, VLDB 2001
• Hippocratic Databases; Agrawal, Kiernan, Srikant, and Xu, VLDB 2002
• Adaptive Query Processing in the Looking Glass; Babu and Bizarro, CIDR 2005 (link)

Reports on Database Research

• The Lowell Database Research Self Assessment (link)
• The Asilomar Report on Database Research; Bernstein et al., SIGMOD Record 27(4), December 1998, pp. 74-80
• Strategic Directions in Database Systems - Breaking Out of the Box; Silberschatz and Zdonik, Readings in Database Systems (3rd edition) 672-679