SQL and Relational Theory - How to Write Accurate SQL Code

In this compact book, Steven Feuerstein, widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on the Oracle PL/SQL language, distills his many years of programming, teaching, and writing about PL/SQL into a set of best practices-recommendations for developing successful applications. Covering the latest Oracle release, Oracle Database 11gR2, Feuerstein has rewritten this new edition in the style of his bestselling Oracle PL/SQL Programming. The text is organized in a problem/solution format, and chronicles the programming exploits of developers at a mythical company called My Flimsy Excuse, Inc., as they write code, make mistakes, and learn from those mistakes-and each other.

This book offers practical answers to some of the hardest questions faced by PL/SQL developers, including:

• What is the best way to write the SQL logic in my application code?



• How should I write my packages so they can be leveraged by my entire team of developers?



• How can I make sure that all my team's programs handle and record errors consistently?

If you’ve been asked to maintain large and complex Hadoop clusters, this book is a must. Demand for operations-specific material has skyrocketed now that Hadoop is becoming the de facto standard for truly large-scale data processing in the data center. Eric Sammer, Principal Solution Architect at Cloudera, shows you the particulars of running Hadoop in production, from planning, installing, and configuring the system to providing ongoing maintenance.

Rather than run through all possible scenarios, this pragmatic operations guide calls out what works, as demonstrated in critical deployments.

• Get a high-level overview of HDFS and MapReduce: why they exist and how they work
• Plan a Hadoop deployment, from hardware and OS selection to network requirements
• Learn setup and configuration details with a list of critical properties
• Manage resources by sharing a cluster across multiple groups
• Get a runbook of the most common cluster maintenance tasks
• Monitor Hadoop clusters—and learn troubleshooting with the help of real-world war stories
• Use basic tools and techniques to handle backup and catastrophic failure

What makes this book different from others on database design? Many resources on design practice do little to explain the underlying theory, and books on design theory are aimed primarily at theoreticians. In this book, renowned expert Chris Date bridges the gap by introducing design theory in ways practitioners can understand—drawing on lessons learned over four decades of experience to demonstrate why proper database design is so critical in the first place.

Every chapter includes a set of exercises that show how to apply the theoretical ideas in practice, provide additional information, or ask you to prove some simple theoretical result. If you’re a database professional familiar with the relational model, and have more than a passing interest in database design, this book is for you.

Questions this book answers include:

• Why is Heath’s Theorem so important?
• What is The Principle of Orthogonal Design?
• What makes some JDs reducible and others irreducible?
• Why does dependency preservation matter?
• Should data redundancy always be avoided? Can it be?

Databases often stay in production for decades, and careful design is critical for avoiding subtle errors and processing problems over time. If they’re badly designed, the negative impacts can be incredibly widespread. This gentle introduction shows you how to use important theoretical results to create good database designs.

Tackle the toughest set-based querying and query tuning problems—guided by an author team with in-depth, inside knowledge of T-SQL. Deepen your understanding of architecture and internals—and gain practical approaches and advanced techniques to optimize your code’s performance.

Discover how to:

• Move from procedural programming to the language of sets and logic
• Optimize query tuning with a top-down methodology
• Assess algorithmic complexity to predict performance
• Compare data-aggregation techniques, including new grouping sets
• Manage data modification—insert, delete, update, merge—for performance
• Write more efficient queries against partitioned tables
• Work with graphs, trees, hierarchies, and recursive queries
• Plus—Use pure-logic puzzles to sharpen your problem-solving skills

Gain a solid understanding of T-SQL—and write better queries

Master the fundamentals of Transact-SQL—and develop your own code for querying and modifying data in Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012. Led by a SQL Server expert, you’ll learn the concepts behind T-SQL querying and programming, and then apply your knowledge with exercises in each chapter. Once you understand the logic behind T-SQL, you’ll quickly learn how to write effective code—whether you’re a programmer or database administrator.

Discover how to:

• Work with programming practices unique to T-SQL
• Create database tables and define data integrity
• Query multiple tables using joins and subqueries
• Simplify code and improve maintainability with table expressions
• Implement insert, update, delete, and merge data modification strategies
• Tackle advanced techniques such as window functions, pivoting and grouping sets
• Control data consistency using isolation levels, and mitigate deadlocks and blocking
• Take T-SQL to the next level with programmable objects