This book is a must-read for everyone aiming to push their relational databases to the limit with their Java application.

There is no resource that better summarizes the performance implications of using JDBC, either directly or via JPA and Hibernate. If you are talking to a database on the JVM, add this book to your reading shelf.

Object to database mapping is one of the core requirements in many Java EE related projects. And the available frameworks make it easy for their users to get started. But as soon as you hit particular requirements around distributed transactions or performance you realise how much database and framework knowledge is required to implement them. Vlad made his insane experience available in an easy-to-read book. If you are dealing with JPA or Hibernate, this book is a must read.

Writing a book is difficult, but writing a book about performance and persistence is a real challenge. If you want to understand how locking, sharding, replication, database concurrency control work, then this book is for you. Vlad gives you plenty of tips and tricks on Hibernate, helping you diagnose your performance issues (e.g. mapping, fetching, or caching). I learn a lot by reading his book and I highly recommend it if you use relational databases and ORM tools such as Hibernate.

Good books on persistence are few and far between. This is something else - it's deeply researched but also entirely practical. I'm basically using it as a reference for everything SQL. Plus, the transaction chapter is a must read.

This book is a highly recommended resource for every developer who is serious about learning and mastering the difficult topic of designing and implementing high performance Java database applications. The book covers in detail the performance aspect of the plain JDBC and Hibernate programming, explains the theoretical and practical implications of the database transactions, and discusses some rare topics such as the database connection pool sizing and statement caching.