Oracle SQL: The Essential Reference (Classique Us)David C Kreines
Taschenbuch
For those who like to know the background and context of a subject, the 17-page foreword in < I> Oracle S Q L: The Essential Reference by Ken Jacobs, an Oracle Corporation Vice Principal, is a treat. It traces the development of S Q L from its first highly mathematical beginnings as defined by Codd nearly 30 years ago to the current S Q L-1999 standard. The book proper is a self-confessed reference book, presenting the topic as concisely as possible. Users are expected to be developers and database administrators who are "somewhat familiar" with the relational model and S Q L. Strangely the author appears to be less familiar than he should be with some aspects of the model, stating as he does that the relational model is so called because tables can be "related". Codd would despair: a relation is simply a mathematical term for a table. Furthermore, Kreines describes an outer join without covering the two flavours-left outer and right outer. The distinction may be trivial but it is likely that both terms will be encountered by anyone working with S Q L for any length of time. Happily things improve dramatically when we reach the nitty gritty of S Q L and P L/ S Q L statements. Contents include chapters on two subsets of S Q L, Data Definition Language ( D D L) and Data Manipulation Language ( D M L): the first is for manipulating the data structure-removing tables, adding columns and so on-and the latter manipulates data-inserting, changing and retrieving it. The highly useful aggregate functions for summarising data get a chapter too, as do the Oracle tools for optimising queries, E X P L A I N P L A N and S Q L Trace. Ultimately this is a highly useful reference to Oracle's implementation of S Q L and, since this is an O' Reilly book with a trademark "animal" cover, I now also know that scorpions fluoresce in ultra violet light. -< I> Mark Whitehorn
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