Customer Reviews

Expert Oracle PL/SQL (Oracle Press)

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Note the word Expert in the title of this book. This is not where you would turn to learn how to write a simple SELECT statement. This book presumes that you have a basic fundamental knowledge of how Oracle and SQL work together. The emphasis here is on the lessor used features, the newest additions to 10g Release 2, in short the information beyond what the basic programmer knowledge that helps to define the expert.

In addition to the standard programming tips, this book goes beyond the basics to look at what the database itself is doing. With more knowledge here, you can better understand what the database itself is doing when it is working on your SQL statements.

Although virtually all databases now use SQL as their basic programming language, each of the big database programs has additions or differences that make that particular version of SQL just a bit different from others. In this book, the authors concentrate on those special features as implemented by Oracle.

This book seemed more like a few seemingly random techniques and tasks that PL/SQL is suited for rather than diving into more general and yet advanced programming. It was useful to gleam some of the ideas used, but it seemed more like longwinded and specific tasks using PL. The book was otherwise organized and well written.

If you need to buy just one book diving into advanced techniques look elsewhere, but for someone with a large collection this may be a good addition.

As a professional PL/SQL developer, I try to keep abreast of the latest and greatest techniques for accomplishing what my clients need done. This book did not provide me with much I could use. Most of it is the kind of obscure bit-twiddling that Object Oriented gurus seem to revel in. If you are a Java or C fan that wants to beat the procedural/relational PL/SQL language to fit into your OO world, you may like this book better than I did. There was some good info about tuning, but I would not buy the book for that alone.