Gray and Reuter's Transaction Processing is absolutely superb, and it covers a good part of this stack, everything lower-level than query planning. However, it covers every approach to doing this. If you want to know how Postgres, say, does it, that's a lot less information, and may be more digestible.
Thanks. I am interested in the general theory of how every database does it; it bothers me that this area of software engineering is terra incognita to me.
