Customer Reviews

SYBASE TRANSACT SQL GUIDELINES BEST PRACTICES

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Sybase Transact SQL Programming Guidelines and Best Practices A Practitioners Approach through Example. (Mich Talebzadeh and Ryan Thomas Putnam)

Like its title, this is a long book; it encompasses 32 chapters and 9 appendices in 750 pages. Despite its title, it is intended for database designers and administrators as well as programmers. The authors appear to be consultants and, judging by their examples, work primarily in the financial arena. The book covers a wide range of Sybase features and includes some functionality as recent as ASE 12.5.2.

The first five chapters briefly cover batches, indexes, fragmentation, search arguments, and, to a limited degree (e.g., only one form of the case statement is listed), best practices. Chapter six addresses tempdb in detail. A short chapter on sort operations is followed by a long one on query tuning. Considerable coverage on reading showplan output is provided. Next are cursors, including a welcome section on alternatives (although the read-only example does not follow their best practice of checking @@SQLSTATUS after the last fetch), joins (but not outer joins), and isolation levels. The next three chapters address locking issues, followed by stored procedure and trigger chapters. After a detour to showplan, optimizer hints are discussed. The various datatypes are listed followed by control-of-flow logic, remote procedure calls, the execute immediate statement (mentioned with disfavor), and key generation (both sequential and random). Functions used with various datatypes are next. Code examples for computing medians, modes, means, and variances are presented. (However, the claim that "calculating any nth percentile is very easy within ASE" would seem to pale in comparison with builtin functions in other DBMSs.) Next the authors cover data purging/archiving, login triggers, and fine grain access control (with another trashing of dynamic SQL). Their techniques of error handling and exception reporting comprise the final chapter. If you are not exhausted by now, you can continue with the appendices on language fundamentals, Transact SQL compilation, variables, functions (again!), global variables, set commands, the authors' favored views (voluminous), sending mail, and determining fragmentation.

Obviously, this book contains a lot of material. What mainly separates this book from others is the authors' presentation of their specialized SQL and UNIX shell code. The chapters on statistical measures, error handling, and exception reporting as well as the code on determining index fragmentation are also not easily found elsewhere. Conversely, some of the chapters (on Query Tuning and Datatypes) and appendices (Functions, Global Variables, and Set Commands) basically appear to be cut-and-pasted from the Sybase documentation. They also appear to have some redundancy.

Other detriments appear to be an above-average number of technical and grammatical errors. For example, the clause on page 44 should be "group by op_services_run_id", not "group by count (op_services_run_id)". "Shared level locks do prevent others from reading ..." on page 251 is one of several obvious errors. The authors indicate that a second edition will be more carefully proofread.

Some of the best practices appear dubious to my subjective eyes. The group by clause is split onto two lines as is every column name and value in an insert statement (e.g., page 338). The authors favor views and disfavor dynamic SQL. The latter preference basically leads them into code parameterization at the shell level. The lengthy Korn shell in Appendix I demonstrates how to determine fragmentation from the UNIX level. The reviewer has not used this script but it appears as if it could be done just as well with dynamic SQL and "sp_" stored procedures.

If you want to have a single "generic reference book" instead of the Sybase manuals (Transact-SQL Guide, Reference Manuals, and Performance & Tuning Guides) and can recognize some obvious mistakes, then this text may fit your needs.

I have read this book and I have found it really good. It is well written in simple enough language even for juniors to follow. Practical examples are very good. Tuning and optimisation examples are excellent and so is tempdb recommendations. By far the best Sybase book I have seen

This book is fantastic! It's by far the best Transact SQL book I have ever read! It covers even the latest procedures and functions up to ASE 12.5.2 If you are working with Transact SQL, this book is an absolute must have!

This book is by far one the best Sybase books I've owned. It offers through guide and practical examples for various knowledge levels. I would definitely recommend it to any Sybase DBA, application developer, and engineers.

For the seasoned developer and administrator alike, this book targets all of those vexing problems that you are currently dealing with or want to avoid in the future. My company was putting together a set of "Best Practices" surrounding SQL development and deployment in a diverse environment. We had to deal with access from the web (Cold Fusion), EJB's (WebSphere), EAI systems (SeeBeyond and ETI), client-server (PowerBuilder), and lastly, batch. Each system had its own unique performance challenge and this book helped us to address them. It's currently a centerpiece in our SQL best practices library. I highly recommend it.

Me and my colleagues had to rely on the out of date Sybase Transact SQL books until a colleague brought a copy from Sybase TechWave 2004 and few of us bought this book as well. We have found it up-to-date, reasonably comprehensive and rich in practical tips on how to write efficient queries. Our company (a medium size financial sector player) wants to purchase a PDF license of this book and we then will use it as a base for our Internal Standards. We all think that it will be money well spent. On the sidelines our DBAs have also used the procedures under "Index Fragmentation" to measure the index fragmentation and perform defragging of the indexes and tables, thus improving the query perormance and space utilisation in the database. We are generally pleased with it.

I have almost finished this book and I have found it extremely useful. It is straight to the point and very good at certain areas such as the choice of indexes, detailed explanations on Data Access, Search Arguments, Various Best Practices and guidelines on using cursors in Sybase and generating Unique Keys. In my opinion it is $45 well spent.

I am new to Sybase having been an Oracle developer for sometime. Migration from PL/SQL to T-SQL is not that easy. However, I found this book very useful in helping me out with T-SQL concepts. I can also use it as a shelf reference for all my Sybase T-SQL needs.

My colleague attended Sybase TechWave 2004 and received a copy of this book from Sybase. I have read it and I like its style. The authors have tried to explain complex topics in practical terms. I was most impressed by chapters covering Data Access, Query Tuning, Cursors and Joins. I recommend it to every Transact SQL developer Sybase or Microsoft. It covers practical aspects without being tedious.

I have read this book and it is by far the best Sybase book I have seen in so many years. It covers up to the latest version of ASE 12.5.2. It is packed with practical examples although I would have liked to see more. I guess you can put so much in a book. It is useful for both the developers and DBAs. The chapters on tempdb optmization, working out fragmentation and purge and archiving will be very handy for DBAs. Very much recommended for both the average and the more experienced readers