Customer Reviews

Mastering Oracle SQL, 2nd Edition

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

[A REVIEW OF THE SECOND EDITION]

Those of you dealing with the latest Oracle 10g, and perhaps frustrated with the quality of the Oracle documentation, might want to consult this second edition. Its greatest difference compared to the first edition is simply that it deals with 10g, whereas the latter talks about 9g. Mishra and Beaulieu explain, with extensive detail and examples, the new features. Like support for unix-like regular expressions within SQL statements. Given that many Oracle users probably hail from a unix/C background, they will welcome this.

Also, for mapping between XML and SQL data types, 10g now integrates XML. This will reduce the impedance mismatch between the object oriented and relational outlooks that bedevil many programmers who have to deal with both.

The only problem I found with this book is its lack of mention of competing databases. Because the authors explicitly assume that you have already committed to using Oracle as your database. Fair enough. But perhaps occasional comments in the text, about how a given command or feature is not possible in another database would be useful and appreciated by Oracle users. Heck, to be fair, on this point, the book is at no relative disadvantage. For example, I have texts on dB2 and MySQL that likewise say zilch about their competitors.

This book presents complex stuctures in an easy to follow fashion with practical examples. I was able to apply new Oracle functions to real reporting problems immediately after reading it.

If you ever have written a PL/SQL function purely to manipulate data because you didn't think SQL would be able to do it, you need to read this book!

The book covers the spectrum from basics to the new 9i analytical functions. As such anyone can benefit from it.

The book is written to help the user understand the power of well structured SQL. It does not contain an exhaustive syntactical list (which can be easily found elsewhere) but rather outlines how to acually use SQL to achieve solid results and optimal performance. In my experience, a high percentage of users who think they know how to write good SQL, actually only know a lot of low-level syntax and are in need of the big picture this book provides.

The chapter on Dates however, does go into fascinating and exhaustive detail of the date data type structure, both pre-existing and Oracle 9i. This is an absolute must for anyone who works with a database that contains highly time sensative data, or for those who are confused by the data type.

The new features in Oracle 9i are clearly outlined such as the reporting functions for grouping at multiple levels. This book presents them in a way that opens the user's mind to endless possiblities, leaving the reader wondering how they every managed without them (or how they will manage without them until their company's next upgrade).

I will agree with other reviewers that cite this book as an excellent resource. It is well organized and easy to follow from topic to topic without getting lost. The examples are well introduced and written with few minor errors. These will be easy to spot for someone who has used any flavor of SQL.

Some issues that I did have with the book revolve around what it isn't. Most of the book revolves around features that are new to 10g rather than a solid overview of the Oracle DML. This means that readers will not be properly introduced to string manipulation outside of the regular expression implementation which is new to 10g (Legacy DBs?). Also, you will have to look elsewhere for good information on CAST, CONVERT and case changing functions. These can be crucial as Oracle is much more strongly typed with regards to data than MS SQL Server.

As DBAs or reporting analysts aren't always privy to the latest release, I see the concentration on 10g's new features as a flaw. Over all this book will introduce you to Oracle SQL in an easy to follow manner. Experienced SQL users will be able to become functional by using this book but, will scratch their heads when they encounter the DML language gaps.

There are a lot of SQL books out there and this one is by no means the "fattest" but if your goal is querying or anything to do with business intelligence, this one is the best. It covers basic queries to advanced queries such as subqueries, CASE statement, and the newer analytic functions. The examples are great.

If you use Oracle SQL on a regular basis, and are looking for more power without turning to procedural SQL, greater understanding of what's possible with Oracle SQL, and overall greater mastery of the language, then this book definitely deserves a place in your library.

A beginner might find him/herself a bit overwhelmed with the depth of the book, but with effort, the knowledge gained from it will prove invaluable. Those already familiar with Oracle and SQL, will still find it very enlightening and enabling.

One very nice feature in the book is how the authors are very good to point out gotchas you might encounter, and particularly workarounds to limitations in Oracle's implementation of SQL. In this way the book falls squarely into the role for which it was intended, i.e., mastering the topic--knowing the inherent strengths and shortcomings of the product, and how to leverage the strengths while working around the shortcomings.

Throughout the book the authors include coverage on new features availble in Oracle 9i, and they are very careful to point out which features covered are available in the various older releases of Oracle (as well as which ones are not).

Mastering Oracle SQL passes the practicality and timeliness rating with flying colors. I've already been able to use several tricks I've learned from the book to great advantage in my daily work.

In summary, if you want to get beyond the simple examples in most books covering SQL, and a better overall picture than what the references and the Oracle documentation have to offer, Mastering Oracle SQL will be an invaluable tool in your hands.

With respect to the lack of an example database mentioned in other reviews, the authors have now posted a zip file in the 'Examples' section of the book's web site ... which includes sql to create and populate the example database used in the book.

Half of this 450 page book surveys basic SQL, and the other half is on features Oracle added to SQL in versions 9i and especially 10g. I bought the book because I believed the title, and the reviews here that said it was an excellent reference. But, to quote one of its authors, "This book is NOT a reference manual, and it is NOT an administrator's guide". It's an overview of SQL only. It is not an introduction; nor can it be used, reference book-fashion, all by itself.

So for my purposes, I was quite disappointed. But the book has some utility, in its explanations of what can be done with Oracle SQL. Especially in the explanations of analytic functions, regular expressions, and XML. It's like a series of magazine articles, with discussion and examples.

The book has some weaknesses:

* The index is very skimpy and incomplete. This is what you'd expect actually, in a book that isn't ever meant to be referred back to.

* The focus on SQL is diluted and inconsistent. For example, there is an explanation on how to set up partitioning. Another section compares Oracle's implementation of regular expressions to Perl's . Sometimes background and comparisons are present, sometimes they're not.

* There isn't much explanation of *why* you'd want to do some of the *whats* that can be done. Yes, it's possible to build classes and objects into a database, but why do it in SQL instead of Java? (Of course the *hows* would be quite inadequate, if this were a how-to book).

* There is too much explanation of how things used to be done in 8i. That version was five years old back when this edition was published. 8i shouldn't take up more than a paragraph or three in a book that purports to cover 9i and 10g.

In summary, if you don't read trade magazines, and you don't care to spend your time on Oracle websites and forums, and you know you won't have access to 11g anytime soon, you may find this book a decent (altho somewhat pricey) way to broaden your horizons of what you can do with Oracle SQL.

I'm no SDE, but I had a need to learn enough SQL to enable me to hit my company's Data Warehouse tables directly and employ some complex joins. This was the book recommended to me, and it did the trick. I sat down and began reading it and was quickly writing increasingly complex queries. I found the explanations easy to follow, and the format intuitive. The only fault I found is that there is a lack of more complex join examples, as when there are more than one field being joined on or more than two tables being joined.

This particular book should be read by all Oracle programmers dealing with SQL, experienced and novice alike. Here are the reasons why:

(1) New features -
Programming languages used with Oracle (SQL, procedural languages like PL/SQL & Java, and even the Oracle database for that matter) are increasingly overlapping into each other's domain and functionality. Java can be used to perform the role of PL/SQL; PL/SQL & the Oracle database can now deal with objects; SQL can now make procedural programming unnecessary in some instances. Especially for Oracle 8i and above, it is imperative for an Oracle programmer to learn about the new features of SQL, and understand when it makes more sense to use SQL instead of other languages mentioned above. This book is excellent in explaining new features.

(2) Clarity of writing - Writing style is lucid, and easy to read and follow. Complex topics are explained quite intuitively. One line seems to clarify what others might take a few paragraphs to explain. Examples are simple enough, but yet relevant enough, to convey the main point across. Too many books submerge the main point in examples that are unnecessarily complex.

This book doesn't explain tuning of Oracle SQL statements in exhaustive detail (though it touches on tuning issues throughout).

The goal of the authors is to explain how to write good readable SQL queries in Oracle 10g. The book starts with how to construct SELECT statements to group, filter and format result sets for dates, reports and data analysis. Then it proceeds to cover Oracle-specific queries and functions for hierarchies (data in tree structures), object-oriented types, XML documents, regular expressions and models (spreadsheet-like objects). Where relevant, there are notes about the differences between SQL for Oracle 10, Oracle 9 and the ANSI standard.

As expected from the title, the chapters using declarative programming (i.e. SQL queries) for relational data, hierarchical data and reports are the most comprehensive. Chapters on interfacing Oracle SQL with other technologies such as scripting (Oracle's PL/SQL), object-oriented types, XML and regular expressions, or on optimization, are brief but sufficient to get you started, especially if you have a existing background in those technologies.

This is the 2nd edition, so it's not surprising that the scope of the book is well-defined and that the writing is easy to read and polished. The example data and queries are just complex enough to demonstrate the issues without obscuring the main points. Minor annoyance about Chapter 15, "SQL Best Practices", which does not explain how to use the query analyzer and bind variables.

I was already familiar with basic Oracle SQL but didn't really understand the language; this book blew away many of the fuzzy concepts in my mind and provided me the framework to tackle more complex problems.

Kam-Hung Soh, 21 May 2007.
[...]

I found this book especially helpful because it was written so a beginning DBA can turn to a page and immediately make sense of what's written. I am a fledgling DBA working with large SQL-type databases in a high-pressure environment. This book provided interesting gotcha's and excellent tips and work-arounds that have been useful in debugging code real-time.
Written to encompass Oracle 10g, this book is a great addition to the manual and has helped me finesse my skills in writing queries, working with the built-in functions, and re-working some of the once-valuable strings that were abandoned after upgrading to a newer version.
Well worth the money - time well spent reading - and pays for itself after helping you out of the inevitable jam.