Mastering Oracle SQL, 2nd Edition

Rating:
Summary: Value for the beginning DBA.
Review: I found this book especially helpful because it was written so a beginning DBA can turn to a page and immediately make sense of what's written. I am a fledgling DBA working with large SQL-type databases in a high-pressure environment. This book provided interesting gotcha's and excellent tips and work-arounds that have been useful in debugging code real-time.
Written to encompass Oracle 10g, this book is a great addition to the manual and has helped me finesse my skills in writing queries, working with the built-in functions, and re-working some of the once-valuable strings that were abandoned after upgrading to a newer version.
Well worth the money - time well spent reading - and pays for itself after helping you out of the inevitable jam.


Rating:
Summary: Good overview of Basic DML & advanced features
Review: I will agree with other reviewers that cite this book as an excellent resource. It is well organized and easy to follow from topic to topic without getting lost. The examples are well introduced and written with few minor errors. These will be easy to spot for someone who has used any flavor of SQL.

Some issues that I did have with the book revolve around what it isn't. Most of the book revolves around features that are new to 10g rather than a solid overview of the Oracle DML. This means that readers will not be properly introduced to string manipulation outside of the regular expression implementation which is new to 10g (Legacy DBs?). Also, you will have to look elsewhere for good information on CAST, CONVERT and case changing functions. These can be crucial as Oracle is much more strongly typed with regards to data than MS SQL Server.

As DBAs or reporting analysts aren't always privy to the latest release, I see the concentration on 10g's new features as a flaw. Over all this book will introduce you to Oracle SQL in an easy to follow manner. Experienced SQL users will be able to become functional by using this book but, will scratch their heads when they encounter the DML language gaps.

Rating:
Summary: An extensive reference, meant for the experienced programmer
Review: The collaborative work of Oracle experts Sanjay Mishra and Alan Beaulieu, Mastering Oracle SQL is now in an expanded and updated second edition covering Oracle Database 10g. An extensive reference, meant for the experienced programmer looking to elevate his or her skill in Oracle SQL to the point of expertise, Mastering Oracle SQL especially focuses upon the software's strengths such as regular expressions, interrow calculations, recursive queries, analytic and advanced GROUP BY functions, and more. Examples, sample code, and detailed walkthroughs for applying Oracle SQL to given tasks and challenges make Mastering Oracle SQL a practical and thorough tool for independent study and professional use.


Rating:
Summary: Best SQL book for BI developers
Review: There are a lot of SQL books out there and this one is by no means the "fattest" but if your goal is querying or anything to do with business intelligence, this one is the best. It covers basic queries to advanced queries such as subqueries, CASE statement, and the newer analytic functions. The examples are great.

Rating:
Summary: Helps you with 10g
Review: [A REVIEW OF THE SECOND EDITION]

Those of you dealing with the latest Oracle 10g, and perhaps frustrated with the quality of the Oracle documentation, might want to consult this second edition. Its greatest difference compared to the first edition is simply that it deals with 10g, whereas the latter talks about 9g. Mishra and Beaulieu explain, with extensive detail and examples, the new features. Like support for unix-like regular expressions within SQL statements. Given that many Oracle users probably hail from a unix/C background, they will welcome this.

Also, for mapping between XML and SQL data types, 10g now integrates XML. This will reduce the impedance mismatch between the object oriented and relational outlooks that bedevil many programmers who have to deal with both.

The only problem I found with this book is its lack of mention of competing databases. Because the authors explicitly assume that you have already committed to using Oracle as your database. Fair enough. But perhaps occasional comments in the text, about how a given command or feature is not possible in another database would be useful and appreciated by Oracle users. Heck, to be fair, on this point, the book is at no relative disadvantage. For example, I have texts on dB2 and MySQL that likewise say zilch about their competitors.