Beginning SQL Queries: From Novice to Professional - Softcover

Clare Churcher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590599438 ISBN 13: 9781590599433

Publisher: Apress, 2008

Synopsis

Clare Churcher’s 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.

• Does not bore with syntax!
• Helps you learn the underlying concepts involved in querying a database, and from there the syntax is easy
• Provides exceptionally clear examples and explanations
• Is academically sound while being practical and approachable

What you’ll learn

• Write simple queries to extract data from a single table
• Understand relational algebra and calculus and why they are important
• Combine data from many tables into one business result
• Avoid pitfalls and traps such as Cartesian products and difficulties with null values
• Summarize large amounts of data for reporting purposes
• Apply set theory to the problems of manipulating data and generating reports

Who this book is for

Beginning SQL Queries is aimed at intelligent laypeople who need to extract information from a database, and at developers and other IT professionals who are new to SQL. The book is especially useful for business intelligence analysts who must ask more complex questions of their database than their GUI–based reporting software supports. Such people might be business owners wanting to target specific customers, scientists and students needing to extract subsets of their research data, or end users wanting to make the best use of databases for their clubs and societies.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Get started on mastering the one language binding the entire database industry. That language is SQL, and how it works is must-have knowledge for anyone involved with relational databases, and surprisingly also for anyone involved with NoSQL databases. SQL is universally used in querying and reporting on large data sets in order to generate knowledge to drive business decisions.

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. Every relational database supports SQL for its expressiveness in writing queries underlying reports and business intelligence dashboards. Knowing how to write good queries is the foundation for all work done in SQL, and it is a foundation that Clare Churcher's book, Beginning SQL Queries, 2nd Edition, lays well.

• Write simple queries to extract data from a single table
  
• Combine data from many tables into one business result using set operations
  
• Translate natural language questions into database queries providing meaningful information to the business
  
• Avoid errors associated with duplicated and null values
  
• Summarize data with amazing ease using the newly-added feature of window functions
  
• Tackle tricky queries with confidence that you are generating correct results
  
• Investigate and understand the effects of indexes on the efficiency of queries
  

About the Author

Clare Churcher is currently a senior lecturer in the Department of Applied Computing at Lincoln University, New Zealand. She holds a degree in physics with first class honors and completed a Ph.D in physics at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. She has done postdoctoral research in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, England.

Clare s research interests are in the management and visualization of data especially for scientific research. She has a background in database design, and has taught programming, analysis and design of information systems, and database management at undergraduate level, as well as software engineering and scientific visualization at post graduate level.

Edition details

• Publisher: Apress
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1590599438
• ISBN 13: 9781590599433
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240