Book Review: RavenDB High Performance

RavebDB High PerformanceIf you use RavenDB in your application you may find the one or other bottleneck. In that case the book “RavenDB High Performance” from Brian Ritchie (@brian_ritchie) may be a good read for you. It is full of practical advice about optimizing your application and getting the most out of RavenDB.

Disclaimer: Packt send me a copy of this book for a review. There were no demands made beyond the point that I should review the book.

 

Not just about high performance

This book covers many important things beyond high performance that you should know to use RavenDB properly. The part about modelling your documents and how to handle relations between them has a profound impact on performance, but even more on the maintainability of your application. Even if you don’t care much about high performance you can learn a lot from this book.

As expected by its title this book will help you to bring your application from ok to high performance. There is however not just one single action you can perform to get to that goal. What steps to take depends on your application and how you define “high performance”. Sharding may be the answer. Or maybe all you need is wasting less time in your calls to RavenDB.

There are many tricks to squeeze more performance out of the API. Most of them are not part of the official documentation and when only as a comment to a more general topic. Brian made a big effort to collect them. And luckily for us he can explain them in a beginner-friendly way as well.

With this book you have a great place to start your journey. There will be a lot of work ahead but you get many tricks to optimize the performance of your application.

 

Look out

High performance is a big and interesting subject that the author tries to cover on 124 pages. Those are far too few pages to get you a profound explanation. If you can live with that and you are looking for a way to optimize your RavenDB installation this is not a problem. Should you need more or want to know different ways this is not the book you are looking for.

The e-book edition has one technical annoyance I don’t want to withhold. The font size for the Kindle edition is so small that I just couldn’t read it. This forced me the first time since I bought my Kindle in 2011 to manually adjust the font size. Even if that is not much work it is not a great first impression.

 

Summary

Your application could be faster. If you use RavenDB you find many tricks in this book to get more performance out of it. All the examples are direct to the point and don’t waste much time with a lengthy introduction. If you need a practical guide for performance optimization you should buy this book.

 

About the book

Title: RavenDB High Performance
Author: Brian Ritchie
Published by: Packt Publishing (August 2013)
ISBN: 978-1-7821-6698-6
Pages: 124

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