Updates
Latest Tweet
What's New?
Check out for latest innovation, a computer based training video collection
Like this Page
SQL Functions Programmer's Reference (Programmer to Programmer) Review by S.Z.
for the most part it does deliver
Like with every Wrox book there are many voices in the book. Unfortunately they do not comprise a choir...You will find a useful info scattered throughout the book; do not try to get a coherent picture out of it. I liked the idea of the book, and for the most part it does deliver.
There were small annoyances here and there:
For example, I find it strange that authors thought it necessary to give their version of pronunciation ":(otherwise known as SQL and pronounced "SEE-kwul") " for what is clearly not a beginner book; and I pronounce it "ess-que-ell" as many of my colleagues do)
Same goes for the first few chapters where authors have chosen to show examples of a basic queries, connect to database syntax etc. UNIX shell function example (p.14) was rather a dubious choice - why not C? VB? Java? Perl? Most database application developers are not familiar with the shell scripts, and could not care less.
It really would help me if the book covered creation of the user defined functions with Java and .NET (available in Oracle, DB2 UDB, PostgreSQL (Java), MSSQL Server, IBM DB2 UDB (.Net/C#); the book only covers Sybase where function created in Java 1.1... Reporting issues (chapter 19) seem torn out of some other book, and badly fitted into SQL Functions...The subject of Regular Expressions was hardly paid any attention, save for the fact that such thing does exist; MSSQL Server, for instance, provides access to OLE interface of its scripting engine Regex implementation. On the other hand, I was delighted to see PostgreSQL included.