sql

Most people that work in SQL daily, don't need reminders of how to write join, correlate or update queries. But the other 10% of the work you do is where you run into trouble. You know you can do something, you just need to know the syntax. This little gem fills that bill nicely. Concise, clear and with a good index, SQL Pocket Guide gives you what you need. Complex functions are explained and it covers DB2, Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL with good depth. Indispensible.

"SQL Pocket Guide" is a short reference book for SQL DML (Data Manipulation Language = insert, update, delete, select verbs) and derived statements (merge in ORACLE, replace in MySQL is missing) for the following databases:
- ORACLE (9i und 10g)
- DB2
- SQL Server
- MySQL
Jonathan Gennick explains the ANSI SQL commands and the special implementations of the different databases. For every statement you will find at least one example that can be tested on Jonathan's example data (available from the O'Reilly website). This book does NOT describe the DDL (e.g. create table) or DCL (e.g. grant) statements of the respective databases. Maybe this book should have been named "SQL (DML) pocket guide" to avoid different expectations.

Being an ORACLE person, I can not comment much on the correctness of the information about the other databases, however I found it quite interesting to see the comparison (ORACLE seems to implement most options).

I found the organization of the book a bit strange when I read it from cover to back (I would have placed type conversions and literals together). If you are using this book as a reference this should not concern you because I found the index to be very good. A chapter numbering (or bigger differences in the font size for the chapter levels) would have made it easier for me to keep track of the subchapter level while reading.

The coverage of the DML statement's possibilities is quite high and lots of exceptions are covered. I (re)learned a lot of things like WITH in ORACLE, NVL2, CASE statement, RETURNING with UPDATE, INSERT und DELETE when I read this book.

I will continue to use this book as a starting point when I don't remember how to use a certain SQL/DML feature (reference lookup). "SQL Pocket Reference" already saved a colleague of mine valuable hours (because I just reread about the MERGE statement). You will not be able to learn SQL with this book but you will probably save some time with it, if you write DML a lot.

First: The signal to noise ratio in this book is wonderful. There's a vast amount of information packed into this little volume.

Second: A significant portion of it has to do with interoperability between database vendors, the differences in syntactic sugar between Oracle/DB2/SQL Server & MySql really don't interest me all that much.

Third: There is nary a word in here about DDL. Nothing on creating/dropping tables, indices & keys, views, databases.

Fourth: Nor is there any treatment on user access (granting permissions, etc.)

Fifth: Selects/Joins/updates/deletes, etc. Are all very thoroughly covered.

These are all things I expect a "SQL Pocket Guide" to have. Instead this is more of a "SQL Interoperability Guide".

Conclusion? This is a great little book if you are not a DBA and never take on the role of one.