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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Clear and straightforward explanations, August 25, 2006
Reviewer: E. Wuehler (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
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The Art of SQL is a truly unique book. In sharp contrast to many other database books on the market, this one does not endeavor to provide an exhaustive SQL reference guide, a low-level vendor-specific DBMS implementation description, or a cookbook-style collection of FAQs. Instead it explains, in incredibly straightforward and clear language, how to think about SQL, schema design, and DBMS operation in general and apply that knowledge to real-world situations. It provides simple mental models for the inner workings of most modern database systems along with concrete examples of how these mental models can be used to speed up queries and design better-performing schemas.
Throughout the book many commonly encountered design patterns query requirements are discussed, such as tree or hierarchy-based data structures, name/value pair tables and various common types of selection filtering and aggregation. For each of these, multiple implementation options are described and evaluated, with the pros and cons of each approach explained. This book assumes the reader is proficient at forming SQL statements, and thus spends its time exploring how restructuring tables and indexes or reforming queries can affect performance. There is a stronger focus on schema design considerations rather than query structure optimization, which I really appreciated because many SQL references focus almost exclusively on the latter.
There are also a number of rather complicated real-world examples sprinkled throughout the book. These are carefully analyzed using the concepts presented in their respective chapters. The idea here isn't that the reader might encounter these exact problems in their projects, but rather to illustrate the process of applying the book's concepts to a concrete problem.
This book is for the most part database vendor agnostic, but still manages to do a great job of explaining the inner workings of databases in a clear, concise manner. In my opinion, it goes to just the right level of detail in explaining things like physical table structure, indexing implementations, locking and the query optimizer. The explanations are simple enough and general enough for mere mortals to internalize, yet still provide a powerful framework for thinking about and improving database performance. Chapter Four, which discussed relational theory and how it relates to SQL, was one of my favorite chapters and serves as a perfect example of this book's ability to provide easily understandable theoretical concepts and tie it in to database implementation and its consequences on query performance against an example table structure.
The Art of SQL is not a beginner's book, and is not an Oracle reference. What is does, however, is provides a conceptual underpinning between these two extremes that will enable database administrators to effectively formulate battle plans against whatever challenges lie in their path. I wish this book had been around when I was learning databases!
