SQL Book Suggestions

[Steve R.]

The 11 Best SQL Books for 2023 Based on Real User Reviews

Our editors have compiled this directory of the best SQL books based on Amazon user reviews, rating, and ability to add business value.

solutionsreview.com

7 Best Books for Learning SQL [2024 Edition] - GeeksforGeeks

A Computer Science portal for geeks. It contains well written, well thought and well explained computer science and programming articles, quizzes and practice/competitive programming/company interview Questions.

www.geeksforgeeks.org

 

[Pat Hartman]

I'd like to add one that doesn't teach SQL but teaches you all the things you don't know about how to make it work better from the developer's perspective, not the DBA's perspective. It is called "the Art of SQL" by Stepahne Faroult, published by O'Reilly. It spends the first two chapters going over normalization and why a sound schema trumps all. It goes into the difference between strategy and tactics and talks about considering the big picture before creating a query and ideas like "assume it will work and trap for errors since most of the time it will work and you come out way ahead". This technique, I've mentioned numerous times with coding not just SQL for the same reason. When you are competing with thousands of other users for time slices to run your transactions, you concentrate on likely outcomes first. Similar to coding the most likely true result first in a Case statement so the code can exit the Case ASAP and not have to process a hundred cases in alphabetical or numeric order.

It is targeted above the heads of novices and is more relevant to "big" RDBMS rather than Jet and ACE but if you know the best techniques to use to create queries to make a "big" RDBMS fly, chances are good that similar methods will apply to Jet and ACE so it still has lots to offer to Jet and ACE developers.

It talks about techniques I learned the hard way very early on in my usage of SQL which started with DB2 in the 80's on multi-million row phone call transaction recordsets. Do you have any idea how many phone calls originate in Connecticut (the area my local phone company served at the time) during any 24 hour period? A lot And CT is a pretty small state with ~ 3.5 million residents.

I don't care for the format of the book. The text is very dense making it a little hard to read at times.