Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #578337 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 254 pages

About the Author

Customer Reviews

A Fresh Look at What we do
First let me point out, there are several problems with this book.

1) The author's english is a bit broken so in some places you will find yourself frustrated by having to read things twice or more to understand it.

2) The author has a great mathematics background, but again in a few places, this actually gets in the way as most of us do not have such a deep mathematics grounding and so won't understand what the math is trying to tell us. Knowing there is a sound mathematical set of principles behind things is nice but the details and symbols are often too deep for me.

3) For those of us who are actually ADVANCED developers, there may be little here in the way of new tips or tricks because you will already know and practice many of the techniques discussed.

INPSITE OF THESE DETRACTORS, I give the book five stars and suggest that anyone looking to go to the next level with their SQL skills should read it for a mind set, because it has the potential to actually change the way we work. Language issue aside, it clearly articulates the idea that it is possible to make a mental leap that will take you from average sql development to great sql development. I liken it to what my typing teacher in High School once told me: "when you stop thinking about the letters and start thinking about the words, your typing will improve dramatically with fewer errors and faster results". In the same way, this author shows us there is a mental leap to be made with sql. The number of lines of code does not matter. What matters is ideas. When we stop thinking about number of tables in the from clause or number of joins in the where clause, and instead start thinking about DESIGN PATTERNS, the quality of our sql code will improve dramtically just like our ability to type did when we made the simple mental leap from letters on a page to words in a sentence.

This is a refreshing new look at what we do. I have thought for some time what the author is saying, but I could not express it in words till I read this book.

Hail Flavius!

I have learnt new methods
This book explain the root techniques for grouping and aggregating. It contains versatile approaches, like summing hashes to group items. By reading this book I have now extended my capabilities to build creative queries.

The author invented many techniques, the most famous is probably the row generator CONNECT BY LEVEL<10. Wise approach to constraint is to use a on-commit refreshable materialized view and a constraint on the materialized view to check the view is empty rather than using a trigger. This technique however requires COMMIT (like a deferred constraint).

reads like a technical database journal
ok vadim knows his stff. but i want to see more emphasis on the practical sections (like sql servers pivot operator, which i use in practice all the time but only got 3 pages, whereas really weird stuff like graphs got like 50 pages.
if your into the super deep stuff u might check this out, however if u are a practical user, than this will be pretty useless.