The column-storage ideas that finally clicked for me

Fundamentals of Software Architecture: A Modern Engineering Approach

Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems

Designing Data-Intensive Applications

Beyond primary keys: how databases index real queries

Building Event-Driven Microservices: Leveraging Organizational Data at Scale

Patterns of Distributed Systems (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Fowler))

How LSM-trees make writes fast without losing ordered data

How databases write data: logs, indexes, and storage engines

Database Internals: A Deep Dive into How Distributed Data Systems Work

Software Architecture: The Hard Parts: Modern Trade-Off Analyses for Distributed Architectures

Microservices Patterns: With examples in Java

How Cassandra Makes LSM-Trees Work at Scale

Game Programming Patterns

What I Learned About Building Reliable Data Systems