Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Book Review: Oracle SQL Recipes - A Problem Solution Approach

Book Review: Oracle SQL Recipes - A Problem Solution Approach
Author: Grant Allen, Bob Bryla, Darl Kuhn
Publisher: Apress Inc
ISBN: 978-1-4302-2509-6

I haven’t been reviewing Oracle SQL books since for the last several years my primary focus has been in the Java realm. However, I still love working directly with databases especially Oracle so I was looking forward to when this book was release and I had high hopes. Luckily the book delivers in fact I wish that I had a book just like this when I started to work with Oracle 12 years ago. It would have made the learning curve much smaller.

As most books about any technical subject they start out with the simple and head toward the more advanced. This book uses the same approach so if you’re already knowledgeable about SQL you can probably skip the first 2-3 chapters. From there the book ramps up the complexity. This is where SQL starts to get really fun. The book covers many aspects of SQL programming that I have encountered over the years. Validating data between tables, dealing with NULLs, manipulating data in and between types, REGEX are just part of what this book covers. In fact I was working today and ran across a problem where I was developing new Java loaders for some large data sets. I need to compare both tables that are located on different databases to make sure that my code is working the same as the old code. I remembered a section from the book (3-9) that shows how to compare two tables and find the differences quickly. This allowed me to implement a check on several tables in just a few minutes. Otherwise I was going to write a Java program to check and compare the data in the objects which would have taken hours to write. This is a good reminder that we should all use the right tool for the job and in many cases dealing with data using SQL is much simpler than other approaches.

I’m not saying that this book has everything that you would ever need in a SQL book but it’s a great place to start. I would highly recommend this book to add to your library of must have SQL books along with about anything from Joe Celko.

1 comment:

--CELKO-- said...

I and my mortgaghe thank you for the kind words.