Reviews for SQL Design Patterns: Expert Guide To SQL Programming (IT In-Focus)

1. Very Heavy Going But Worth It

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, October 12th, 2009

   From relational algebra to completed SQL solutions, this book takes you through the steps necessary to solve those nasty programming problems in SQL that would make others run for the procedural solution. Some of it is heavy going, but it is worth the effort.

2. Poor

   Rated 1 out of 5 stars, November 12th, 2007

   The premise (and promise) of this book to go some way to being "Design Patterns, elements of reusable object oriented software" by Gamma et al. for the SQL programming world.
   
   I have seen solutions that Vadim Tropashko has posted on the Oracle Forums and followed the development of this book. I had high expectations, as he is obviously a highly intelligent individual with excellent knowledge of RDBMS engines and relational design. Unfortunately his book does not deliver in any way, shape or form.
   
   I'm not suggesting that quantity should prevail over quality, but book is surprisingly short given the verbosity of the contents list. I was hoping to see short, concise treatments of each item in the contents list but rather there were rambling monologues about the mathematical origins of the problem at hand. In some cases, this is entirely necessary and completely appropriate, but in others it just felt like padding.
   
   A particular example, which was very disappointing, was the Skyline query. The author describes the problem, proposes one example and then proceeds to say how poor the performance will be and half explains why. Instead of then showing alternatives and explaining the reasoning behind them, the author merely points out a PDF document available on the web entitled "The Skyline Operator". If that was all the author intended to do, why even mention the Skyline query in the first place? What value has he added? Zero.
   
   This example is really the crux of the matter for me. The rest of the book has this same approach to many of the proposed problems and seems to be a forum for discussing the mathematical definition of the problems rather than a platform for educating others. The author gets lost in chastising the designers of the Analytic SQL syntax and soap boxing about how things should be. This is not really of any relevance. The syntax is the syntax. This book, from the title, is not about syntactic design, it is about solving problems. Much of the space wasted on these types of discussion could have been put to much better use actually showing problems and proposing solutions.
   
   A far superior title in my opinion, is Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties. Admittedly the title is rather patronising, but the content is far from it. This is the type of book that SQL Design patterns should have been.
   
   All of this said, there are some interesting parts of the book which I am sure will come in useful at some point, and the author does have a very rigorous approach to defining problems. The book though, comes across as an academic paper that hasn't been submitted for peer review.