RDBMS – Geek Book

SQL in a Nutshell

Posted on 11 May, 2009 by bookGeek

The cover of SQL in a Nutshell sports a chameleon, the little lizard well known for its ability to blend in just about anywhere. This is a great choice for the Structured Query Language. SQL has been around since the seventies, helping developers interact with the ubiquitous relational database management system. Thirty some years later, SQL grinds away in the background of just about any interactive web site and nameless other technologies. New alternatives are popping up constantly but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that SQL is going to be around for a long time. Anyone interacting with an RDBMS is in all likelihood going to need to use SQL at some point. For those that do, who also want a handy desktop reference available, SQL in a Nutshell has been there for the last 9 years. The SQL language itself has not stood still over those years, and neither have the products that use SQL, and so now the book has is available in a third edition.

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The Manga Guide to Databases

Posted on 25 April, 2009 by bookGeek

Princess Ruruna, of the Kingdom of Kod, has a problem. Her parents, the King and Queen, have left to travel abroad. Ruruna has been left to manage the nations fruit business. Much is at stake, Kod is known as “The Country of Fruit.” Ruruna is not happy though, as she is swamped by paperwork and information overload. A mysterious book, sent by her father, contains Tico the fairy. Tico, and the supernatural book are going to help Princess Ruruna solve her problems with the power of the database. This is the setting for all that takes place in The Manga Guide to Databases. If you are like me and learned things like normalization and set operations from a rather dry text book, you may be quite entertained by the contents of this book. If you would like to teach others about creating and using relational databases and you want it to be fun, this book may be exactly what you need.

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Refactoring SQL Applications

Posted on 6 March, 2009 by bookGeek

My past as a DBA probably makes me a bit biased, but the reaction I’ve seen the most when a database application isn’t performing as well as would be liked seems to focus on the database side of things. The search for a solution usually seems to center around tuning db parameters, the building (or removal) of indexes and if the budget allows, throwing hardware at the problem. In their new work, Refactoring SQL Applications, Faroult and L’Hermite bring a much wider range of options to the table. There is a lot in this little book for the developer charged with fixing an existing application and I think a lot of good information that could save one from making a number of head-ache inducing mistakes on a new application.

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MySQL in a Nutshell

Posted on 30 November, 2008 by bookGeek

MySQL is frequently touted as the world’s most widely used relational database management system. Many of the worlds most well known web applications and web sites use MySQL as their data repository. The popularity of MySQL has continued to grow while at the same time many were taken aback by the lack of many features considered to be essential to a ‘real’ rdbms. Such naysayers have done little to impeed the growth or development of MySQL. The first edition of MySQL in a Nutshell, published in 2005 gave users a handy reference to using MySQL. The second edition published in 2008 with coverage of many new features that MySQL fans proudly proclaim as an answer to all those critics clamoring for a more well rounded rdbms.

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