Manga Guide to Databases

The Manga Guide to Databases is one volume in Ohmsha's Japanese "Manga Guide" series. It was written by Mana Takahashi, with manga production by TREND-PRO, and translated into Chinese by Cui Jianfeng. The book weaves the seemingly abstract, jargon-heavy subject of databases into the story of a fictional kingdom (often called the "Kingdom of Code" in the book, which also involves fruit exports and sales): the kingdom runs into real troubles—duplicated data, contradictory records, difficulty adapting to change—and gradually resolves them by learning about databases and the relational model. The content proceeds from shallow to deep: it first explains "why we need databases," then covers the basic terminology of relational databases and set operations (union, difference, intersection, Cartesian product, projection, selection, join, division), then uses the E-R model to analyze requirements and explains table normalization, before moving into basic SQL operations—retrieval, conditions, aggregate functions, grouping, subqueries, multi-table joins, and inserting, updating, and deleting tables and views—and finally extends to applied topics such as transactions, locks, concurrency control, isolation levels, index optimization, security and failure recovery, distributed databases, and stored procedures, with an appendix of common SQL commands. The whole book advances through manga scenarios, each followed by explanatory text that helps readers map the story's problems onto specific database concepts. It emphasizes building intuition and an overall framework rather than replacing a systematic database textbook, so it is positioned as a light introductory read for beginners, young readers, and anyone curious about databases.