Great list. Almost anything Jim Gray wrote, or any of Michael Stonebraker's C-store stuff, is worth reading. Database Systems: The Complete Book by Garcia-Mol

Great list. Almost anything Jim Gray wrote, or any of Michael Stonebraker's C-store stuff, is worth reading. Database Systems: The Complete Book by Garcia-Molina, Ullman, and Widom seems to be one of the few full books with decent coverage of implementing a database, even though anyone wanting to implement a modern database will have to go a long way from what it covers. There are a ton of great papers out there easily accessible, though, at least in part thanks to the VLDB Endowment. The people at MS Research working on databases publish a lot of great papers, too.