Customer Reviews

SQL Built-In Functions and Stored Procedures: The i5/iSeries Programmer's Guide

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This book concentrates on using the IBM mid-range computer systems with DB2 as the database.

SQL, is usually thought of as simply a bunch of commands used to manipulate data in a database. Most books talk about the big three SQL commands of SELECT, INSERT, and UPDATE as being just about all that SQL can do.

In reality, the "L" stands for "Language" and the full fledged SQL's in the big databases are full fledged languages. Like other languages, they have logic, loops, functions, and internal variables just like other languages.

While SQL is a standard, each implementation does things just a bit differently. This small book gives a very quick overview of the standard commands like SELECT, but spends most of its pages on doing stored procedures the IBM way.

I am a computer programmer/analyst for a major manufacturing company and a need has recently come for us to write some stored procedures for interfacing our machine software on PC workstations with our AS/400. I've written many RPG IV programs with embedded SQL and even wrapped them in stored procedures, but I wanted to learn SPL to try to avoid the middle man. This book was NOT easy-to-understand as advertised. Rather than explain, line by line, what each command does/means so that you can use it for your own purposes, he just gives you an example procedure and tells you what it does. These procedures are supposed to be useful, but we can't use many of them and I think some would be much better served in other languages. I found this book very poorly written and difficult to follow. It started out just fine, but about 50+ pages into it he abandons his clear explanations and goes far beyond a beginner's means--like flooring the pedal in a Firebird. It was almost as if he had a deadline to meet and wrote the second half of the book in a fraction of the time he spent on the first half. If I wanted something so technical and confusing I would have read the free IBM manual rather than buy this book. MC PRESS needs to change this book's rating from 'Novice' to 'Advanced' and a second edition needs to be released correcting all the errors. Mr. Faust you dropped the ball on this one.

The book starts out with good details on some of the keywords, but seems to give big examples, with brief explanations toward the end of the book. I was hoping for a bigger book, with better examples.

Mike Faust did it again. He has given busy professionals a

detailed, percise "how-to" book for SQL built-in functions and stored procedures. There's no excuse not to use these useful, time saving tools once you purchase this book.