thats a really good question, unfortunately everything I learned was by working with people who knew more than I did. its pretty sad that alot of systems work is that way.

this book looks to be pretty comprehensive, and explicitly discusses on-disk structures, write ahead logging, and recovery.

  http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/dscb.html

relational languages and transactions get alot more playin the academy..i think its because you can make sense of them in some abstract way without getting sucked into involved discussions about caching heuristics and OS write guarentees, scheduling and fussy performance characteristics