What can you do when database performance doesn't meet expectations? Before you turn to expensive hardware upgrades to solve the problem, reach for this book. Refactoring SQL Applications provides a set of tested options for making code modifications to dramatically improve the way your database applications function. Backed by real-world examples, you'll find quick fixes for simple problems, in-depth answers for more complex situations, and complete solutions for applications with extensive ...

In just 24 lessons of one hour or less, you will learn professional techniques to design and build efficient databases and query them to extract useful information. Using a straightforward, step-by-step approach, each lesson builds on the previous one, allowing you to learn the essentials of ANSI SQL from the ground up.

Example code demonstrates the authors’ professional techniques, while exercises written for MySQL offer the reader hands-on learning with an open-source database. I...

Beginning SQL Queries is your guide to mastering the lingua franca of the database industry: the SQL language. Good knowledge of SQL is crucial to anyone working with databases, because it is with SQL that you retrieve data, manipulate data, and generate business results. Knowing how to write good queries is the foundation for all work done in SQL, and it is a foundation that Clare lays well in her book.

Joe Celko has looked deep into the code of novice SQL programmers and found a consistent and troubling pattern. These programmers have not changed their approach from writing code for a procedural language, like C, to a declarative language--which is what SQL is. As a result they are not fully using the power and capability inherent in SQL and that translates into writing more code than they need to write, more complex code than is needed, and ultimately lower productivity.

Thinking...

Get started with PL/SQL, the built-in language that every Oracle developer and database administrator must know, in Beginning PL/SQL, a fast-paced and example-filled tutorial. Learn from author Don Bales' extensive experience to discover the most commonly used aspects of PL/SQL without wasting time with obscure and obsolete features.

Author Don Bales takes his 20+ years of experience and a wealth of statistics he's gathered on PL/SQL usage over those years and applies the 80/20 rul...

Joe Celko's Trees and Hierarchies in SQL is an intermediate to advanced-level practitioners guide to mastering the two most challenging aspects of developing database applications in SQL. In this book, Celko illustrates several major approaches to representing trees and hierarchies and related topics that should be of interest to the working database programmer. These topics include hierarchical encoding schemes, graphs, IMS, binary trees, and more. This book covers SQL-92 and SQL:1999.

As dynamic, database-driven Web sites become the standard, more and more nonprogrammers just like yourself are being forced to work with database information and create and edit database objects. With SQL and this task-based guide to it, you can do it too--no programming experience required!

After going over the relational database model and SQL syntax in the first few chapters, veteran author Chris Fehily launches into the tasks that will get you comfortable with SQL fast. In addi...