5 comments about Understanding Relational Databases with Examples in SQL-92.

1. This book simply does not adequately explain relational databases. Look for something better



2. Terse and authoritative, but engaging. This book's style may not be for everyone but its content is well worth the effort of study and review. It's short for a book on relational theory, which derives from the author's economy of exposition rather than from a lack of depth or coverage. In reading it I was repeatedly struck with the sense that the author truly understands his subject (he's written over 100 articles on SQL and relational theory for publications like Byte, DBAdvisor, InfoWorld, Oracle Magazine, and SQL Forum). The book assumes that you have some coding or database experience. Understanding Relational Databases is an excellent choice if you want to fully grasp the issues.



3. If you need to know something about relational databases, it is possible to pick out some things. If you want to read on every page about how nobody is doing it right, this is for you. His monomania about the shortcomings of database vendors verges on the insane.



4. This is the book that jumped my career orders of magnitude higher than it otherwise would have been. It does take some quiet time to read and understand this book. If you're looking for an MSAccess primer to read on the bus on the way in to your HTML scripting job, this isn't it, buy a "dummies" book. On the other hand, if you want to understand the guiding principles of ALL database design and modeling (which is the critical core task of all information application development), and then be better at it than 99% of your peers, I don't know of a better document you could possibly study. In terms of real world, on the job usefullness, this book surpasses ANYTHING else I've EVER read about Information Technology.



5. This book may be short in length; however, it is has enormous informational depth. Pascal certainly knows his stuff. In this book he writes about concepts and practices that are greatly lacking in the world of database management and development. He points out how, even, expert players of the database world fail to give the most fundamental and important aspects of database design/development proper emphasis. And he tells us why it is so important.

   Readers really should have a good understanding of SQL before reading this book. If the reader has solid understanding of set theory (collage level) they should follow this book easily. If the reader is not too sharp with math they will struggle with many of the advance concepts that Pascal covers. But the reader should still understand the underlying message, database integrity. This book explains why database integrity is vital to a successful database, as well as, how to implement good database integrity. Pascal does get a little too passionate, well actually, he rants. Some people might find it a little dark, but I thought it was a kind of funny.

5 comments about Beginning Visual Basic SQL Server 7.0.

1. Thearon Willis's approach is pretty straight forward, and that's what I like. In short this book gets a solid positive review and has minor peeves.

   In short this is a great intro to SQL server 7. Good use of explaining triggers, and stored procedures. Most important the examples are REAL WORLD BUSINESS examples that you can use. So many other books get you to do things that are totaly useless.

   While I wouldn't design and interface like he did, or make the tables, as such, and I did find his stored procedures a bit overly lengthy, it's still a great book to get started on and has a lot of usefull stuff. Knowing VB helps but not neccesary and is of course not concentrated on either..

   solid 4, Another good Wrox book.




2. I've been a software engineer for just over 20 years now, and to this date, this author is by far, the most talented author, I've encountered. The book covers all that is required, for a Visual Basic developer, to learn the tasks associated with building applications for Visual Basic using SQL. With other books, it never failed that the author would leave something important out, when demonstrating a technique, but the author of this book, Thearon Willis, covers everything, down to the intimate detail. Thearon also has reminders through out the book, that remind the reader not to forget to do something, that may have already been covered. I believe the author has the ability to convey upon the reader, in an understandable manner, like no other author has.

   Many Thanks




3. I own 2 books written by Thearon Willis, this book and "Beginning SQL Server 2000 for Visual Basic Developers". Both books are excellent. Combining this book and Rob Vieira's "Professional SQL Server 7.0 Programming", I got a very knowledgeable skill set that combines Visual Basic 6.0/5.0, SQL Server 7.0 and RDO/DAO. If you have to maintain applications written in Visual Basic 6.0 and earlier or if the database is SQL Server 7.0, you will want to read this book. Please note: if you want to use latest ADO, you may have make some minor modifications to the examples in this books.



4. I guess an 860 page book sells better than a 250 page book, that
   would explain all needless pages in this book!

   This book repeats and repeats the same description of the code
   over and over and over...

   Not to many authors are smart enought to realize when you
   teach something keep it as simple as possible ( no charge for the tip to you authors out there.)

   For example don't include a column for address1 , address2
   and address3 and then write code to test if address2 and address3
   are NULL. The Address1 column is enough to get the point across. This kind of "filler" only distracts from the main point of learning ADO and SQL.

   And the Author over does normalization - you would be looked
   at as a rank novice if you did this type of "over" normilization
   in professional code.

   Book would get 4 stars if it was not filled with so much
   fluff and filler and fluff and filler ....




5. Don't let the one star reviewer put you off. This is a good book available at a bargain 2nd-hand price. The joke below about fitting this content into a book of 250 pages shows that another reviewer doesn't know what he's talking about. But the examples are a bit OTT as the case studies are large so there's a bit of repetition. It could probably have been shrunk to about 700 pages (rather than 900) with smaller (kiddy type) case studies. Likewise it's not possible to overdo normalization - just because some so-called professionals don't bother with it as much as they should is no reason why a beginner shouldn't learn best practice.

   The writer assumes that you already know Visual Basic 6 so doesn't cover much VB code. The focus is on SQL Server 7 stored procedures which are professionally done.

   The "Beginning" title is a bit misleading too. This is a book for serious programmers who, although still beginners, want to be good - not for hackers.

   The book is well made with hardly any errors that I've spotted and the code examples work.

   I recommend Vieira's two books as well - on SQL Server 7 and 2000.

   4 stars only (nearly 5) - the case studies are a little larger than need be.

No comments about MS SQL Server Interview Questions, Answers, and Explanations: MS SQL Server Certification Review.

5 comments about Teach Yourself Pl/SQL in 21 Days (Sams Teach Yourself).

1. I started learning pl/sql a couple of weeks ago. I am halfway through the book(i am not doing a chapter a day:). I find it very easy to comprehend ,even by a novice. I think it is a really good start if you know some sql. There are a few small flaws(typo errors) which are no problem.



2. For the novice user, chapters 1 through 8 give a good description of the language. I was able to understand how the language works and do the exercises. From chapter 9 until the end, I guess the authors assume that the debugging chapter was enough to start debugging their examples. Even some the examples on the CD-ROM did not execute.

   Week 3 is the worst if you do not have the Oracle software listed in chapter 1, but it is worth the read. At least you can impress the interviewer at your next interview.

   If you want to learn a little about Oracle and have some Visual Basic experience, try Nick Snowden's Oracle with Visual Basic. It is mainly SQL, but I got a better view of how Oracle operates.

   I used the 21-Day Book for Visual Basic 5 and learned a lot (first time I had ever used VB). I was expecting the same level of learning from this book and was highly disappointed.

   As for a good PL/SQL book, I am still looking.




3. If you're totally new to pl/sql programming, this is a good book. The explainations are simple and easier to understand than other books that I assume expects you to have some experience. This book gives you some good samples for starters but after finishing this book, I recommend you get a more hardcore book. You could follow the next book you buy with ease and learn a little more. One problem is that this book mentions things that are covered in later chapters, so you might have to go back to the index and jump around a litte (other books do this butthey do it more often).



4. I've found this book very helpfu



5. If you are starting out in Oracle PL/SQL, this book and their online help HTML/PDF is the only source you are going to need. All other books out in the bookshelves are garbage. This is one of the best books out of shelf-full of bad books on PL/SQL. Index on the back of the book is incomplete to say the least. I believe any good programming book should have extensive index, since nobody has the time to go through the whole book, and we need to refer to index for different things as we work on a project. So far, of all the books, and I have a collection now, this book is the most comprehensive book, if you can find what page to look.

No comments about Teach Yourself PHP with MySQL.

No comments about Ingenieria del Software.

No comments about Introduction to Oracle: SQL and PL/SQL, Vol.1.

5 comments about SYBASE TRANSACT SQL GUIDELINES BEST PRACTICES.

1. 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.



2. 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.



3. 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.



4. 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.



5. A Great book if you like Cheese, Ferraris and even Fast Woman!

5 comments about Oracle Performance Tuning (Nutshell Handbooks).

1. I have been using a copy of this book for a couple of years now, and I have still kept it as my 'good tricks' bible since becoming being a certified Oracle dba. Ok, so not all the queries run first time as given, and the book is really about Oracle 7, but this is still the first reference book I turn to whenever another dba comes up with a 'I've tried everything to do this, but nothing works' type question. A very good book to read if you want to know how to make Oracle work for you.



2. This is the best overall book on Oracle Tuning but the editors were sloppy in weeding out the typos--no excuse for a second edition book. The index is one of the worst that I've ever seen in a technical book; sometimes you practically have to look at every page to find what you're looking for because of the way the book is organized.



3. Many of the tricks and approaches offered in here can enable you to perform some impressive rescuing of slow applications. Management tends to like this quite a bit. Having had this book from way back, there were many tips in there that were not available from the standard Oracle documentation such as making a query return unique records by using the rowid in the where clause. If you're in a database-centric development or DBA position, I wholeheartedly recommend this book.



4. The first edition, or as we affectionately called it, the "Bee" book was the bible. I recently bought the 2nd edition for old times sake. It still has a lot of good info but sorely needs to be updated. There are many Oracle8i performance features such as tempfile for temporary files that are not mentioned. Instead, I am turning to more recent text like Oracle8i & Unix Perf Tuning by Ahmed Alomari and Oracle Perf Tuning Tips by Richard Niemiec. Mark, loved your books. Can't wait for the updates.



5. This book has a lot of Oracle tuning tips and advise about some certain plattforms and technologies. Although there's a lot of considerable information about almost anything related with Oracle tuning (including OPS), it doesn't provide with a concise method or guide.

   The book is structured to help you at different stages of your Oracle implementation (design phase, production, proactive and reactive tuning, capacity planning, etc). But that good schema looks very confuse when the author starts to make suggestions or tips that aren't sorted by any kind of category (and they often takes a lot of pages)... Those comments are very good, so it needs a bit of more organization.

   I recommend this book for instance and database tuning, but not for SQL tuning (the author has another excellent book on this subject). There aren't too many advices regarding the plattform (unix or nt), so, keep in mind you'll need more support.

5 comments about Beginning SQL Programming (Programmer to Programmer).

1. It is obvious this book was a rush to press item. There are so many mistakes and inconsistent example formats in this book that it is an embarrassment. The authors also get sidetracked with many of their examples and leave you hanging. The book does contain SQL, but mostly it promotes "Microsoft tools." I would not recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn SQL. It is simply another rush to market book on how to do X. O'Reilly's SQL Essentials is by far many times better!



2. I don't understand some of the very negative reviews here. If you are new to SQL, then this book will be a good compagnon.
   This book worked for me, it's gives you the fundamentals you need to get to the more advanced stuff. This book is to teach SQL, as a reference I use o'reillys SQL in a nutshell. And the comment on the price? Well, i think all programming books are getting more and more expensive...



3. Nice overview of SQL in Access, SQL Server and Oracle. Reviews mostly basic methods, but comprehensively, and that's just what I needed.



4. This has got to be the worst book on any computing subject ever published. The try it out sections and code snippets throughout the book are about 80% incorrect, honestly the level of errors and poor coding is disgraceful. Wrox books are normally of a very high quality but this one is absolutely terrible, I can't emphasised that enough. I begun this book with high enthusiasm for this subject but now my enthusiasm has totally diminished.

   Apart from the appalling level of errors there is also a high level or repetition, which can only be down to poor communication among its authors. Then in other areas you'll find exceptional weak explanations or explanations lacking altogether.

   The book skims over most of SQL, it doesn't cover it all by a long shot (as another reviewer has suggested). Also those who have praised this book must of read it like a novel, because if they really analysed and tested the code they would of realised most of it is incorrect. I just don't believe anyone who really examined this book could give it any praise, it really is awful.

   Some of the try it out sections constantly use parts of SQL that aren't covered till later in the book, so you're pretty much left hanging, or jumping back and forward. Confusion reigns. You'll also find that the authors apply a style of SQL common to the DBMS they each use most often, so you end up with different types of SQL. This is all very well for an intermediate or advanced text but not in a book for beginners, as this just adds to the already overloaded confusion level.

   The case study at the end of the book uses both ASP and VBScript so if you don't know those you can forget the case study. This is disappointing as case studies can really help your understanding of the language, and how it should be applied in the real world.

   The errata page for the book on the Wrox website only includes about 9 errors (at the time of writing this). I've been told that they haven't got anyone to do these updates yet, this has been the case for sometime. So if you encounter trouble you'll have to find a forum and a helpful techie to help you through instead of Wrox support. This is very annoying and extremely disappointing consider the volume of errors. So prepare yourself for some major headaches.

   If you complete this book you'll note yourself feeling numb and confused . You will have to buy another book to put all the wrongs in this book right in your mind, and believe me there are loads of wrongs to put right. This really is a very, very poor publication. DON'T BUY!!!




5. It's difficult to know where to start with this book. Errors I suppose is the best place. There are so many errors in the examples in this book it is embarrassing, it would be laughable as well, but instead it is seriously annoying. It makes grasping the concepts almost impossible as you keep having to tinker with the code to get it to work, or seek other sources of information to find out how it should be done, which defeats the purpose of using this book altogether.

   As another reviewer has mentioned, I don't believe the authors communicated much, if at all, when writing this book. It explains some concepts several times throughout the book, as if each author is taking a crack at it, and then other concepts are ignored completely.

   Another really annoying thing about this book is that there isn't much hands on stuff, they just talk at you, rather than involve you. The 'try it out' sections typical of Wrox books are few and far between in this publication. There aren't any questions to test your knowledge at the end of each chapter either. I say again this book just 'talks at you'; it leaves you feeling quite numb.

   It's odd that for a manual of over 700 pages you will feel as if you have learnt very little. Anything of real value, that would help you in the real world of development, has been left out. Sometimes it mentions some feature that would be of real value and then the words 'but we won't be covering that in this book' appear. This happens again and again to the point of insanity.

   The only thing I have learnt from this book is that I will have to buy another book to learn SQL, but it won't be a Wrox publication this time, Wrox are beginning to fall in my estimation. I really don't know what Wrox and the authors were thinking when they released this, it really is terrible. You know you really get the feeling that Wrox are getting you to do their proof reading for them!