Books written by Jim Gray.
Jim Gray won the Turing Award for his seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation.
Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques
This book will show you how large, distributed, heterogeneous computer systems can be made to work reliably.
The Benchmark Handbook: For Database and Transaction Processing Systems
If you need to test the performance of an online transaction processing (OLTP) system, The Benchmark Handbook for Database and Transaction Processing Systems can help you choose the right tool and decipher its output.