Rating: 
Summary: Expanded 2nd Edition (more than 3x larger!)
Review: Expanded 2nd Edition (more than 3x larger!)
fyi ... Amazon is including here reviews from both 1st and current 2nd edition. 1st Edition was a "slim" 224 pages (released December 1, 2000 per Amazon). 2nd Edition is 800 pages (released September 27, 2004 per Amazon). From 224 to 800 pages ... hmmm, quite a change!
Per OReilly.com, current 2nd edition covers commercial RDBMS (Oracle, DB2, and Microsoft SQL Server), and open source implementations (PostgreSQL, and MySQL). fyi, 1st edition did not cover DB2.
2nd Edition is updated to use the most current ANSI standard, SQL2003, as the baseline in comparing each of the RDBMS.
Sample chapter available at OReilly.com. Chapter 4, SQL Functions. As PDF, 28 pages.
Rating: 
Summary: I like this book
Review: I have always enjoed Klein's books, and this is another fine one from him. It is not product-specific, so if you need that, you will need other books. But the ANSI SQL solutions here are quite good and very useful in many cases. I would think that they would work with most of the DBMS's on the market. The explanations are good and the sample code is quite extensive.
Rating:
Summary: I like this book
Review: I have always enjoed Klein's books, and this is another fine one from him. It is not product-specific, so if you need that, you will need other books. But the ANSI SQL solutions here are quite good and very useful in many cases. I would think that they would work with most of the DBMS's on the market. The explanations are good and the sample code is quite extensive.
Rating:
Summary: Great reference, but tough to find what you're looking for
Review: I have the 2nd Edition, which is 600+ pages.
The amount of information included is incredible. Each description of the individual statements has a "Programming Tips and Gotchas" which can be really helpful. I appreciated the "Rules at a Glance" in each section which give just a quick overview of each statement - the details are described in the section for each database (DB2, Oracle, MySQL, etc).
However, for me personally, the massive amount of quantity also leads to my frustration trying to look up a specific statement. The font is small (or at least appears small) and the text looks crammed together - it's tough to see where one thing starts and another ends. There is a margin indicator marking 400+ pages as the "Statement" section, which is just a big black streak down the edge of the book. I think would have been more helpful had it been alphabetic margin indicator tabs (A, B, C and so on) - this would have made finding statements easier.
So, there's my problem - a great book on content (I wouldn't want to see less), but tough (at least for me) to quickly find what I'm looking for - which is what you want in a desktop reference.
Content = 5 stars
Readability = 3 stars
Rating:
Summary: Great Overview,Light on Details
Review: I have to question whether any of the other reviewers even looked at the table of contents before purchasing this book:Chapter 1. SQL, Vendor Implementations, and Some History - a general overview of SQL and where it comes from; Chapter 2. Foundational Concepts - The general theory behind how a sql works; Chapter 3. SQL Statements Command Reference - "Quick SQL Command Reference"; Chapter 4. SQL Functions - A standard function reference and vendor extensions; Chapter 5. Unimplemented SQL99 Commands - commands in the sql standard which aren't implemented by vendors (MS, Oracle); So as to what it says it covers, it does it quite well. Already being quite familiar with SQl, I still found this book to be useful both as a quick reference to commands as well as for a deeper understanding into how SQL works. This book makes an excellent companion to Transact-SQL Programming, also by Oreilly. If you need a complete SQL reference, get Transact-SQL. If you're looking for a background and introduction to SQL, get this book.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best SQL books under 300+ pages.
Review: I've always been impressed with O'Reilly's ability to pack so much information into one of its "In a Nutshell" titles. By starting off with a little bit of history and then running head first into the core concepts and constructs of the language they allow you to hit the ground running. The bulk of this technical reference covers the wide variety of statements that SQL uses with in-depth explanation of each. Something that I was unaware of until reading this book is that SQL has preexisting functions aside from its cases. This wonderful reference has everything you'll need to start creating SQL databases for your specific distribution, (SQL, MS SQL, MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL).
Rating:
Summary: One of the best SQL books under 300+ pages.
Review: I've always been impressed with O'Reilly's ability to pack so much information into one of its "In a Nutshell" titles. By starting off with a little bit of history and then running head first into the core concepts and constructs of the language they allow you to hit the ground running. The bulk of this technical reference covers the wide variety of statements that SQL uses with in-depth explanation of each. Something that I was unaware of until reading this book is that SQL has preexisting functions aside from its cases. This wonderful reference has everything you'll need to start creating SQL databases for your specific distribution, (SQL, MS SQL, MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL).
Rating:
Summary: What the book is, and what it is not.
Review: This book is designed as a reference -- the book that you keep
near your workstation after you learn the basics, because you
haven't got everything memorised yet. It's great for that. I
refer to it when I have a question. But actually I picked up this book with no prior knowledge of
SQL (except that I knew it was for doing database stuff) and
learned enough to get started in a couple of days. The intro
is great for that. The great thing about this book is that it covers the four
major SQL implementations in a relatively unbiased fashion.
This is nice because if you switch from one to another you
don't have to go looking for a new book. (Otherwise, you
would; as you will see from reading this book, the various
implementations differ considerably and also differ from
the unimplemented standard, which the book also covers.) This book is not, and is not intended to be, a tutorial for
people who are utterly unfamiliar with the very concept of
a database, but it's okay to be utterly unfamiliar with SQL. This book also is not a strategy guide for how to plan and
organise your database; this is an _implementation_ book.
As such, it doesn't cover things like deciding which data
to put in which table, when to create another table and
when to create an entirely separate database, or that sort
of thing. What it does tell you is what query syntax you
need to create and interact with your database, your tables,
and the data in your tables. It also explains datatypes,
because they vary considerably between the different SQL
implementations, and table types and the various attributes
(indeces and whatnot). Additionally, this book is not a security guide. It does
include information about permissions, but only in terms of
the syntax used, not in terms of strategy.
Rating:
Summary: Good Reference
Review: This book is great for a desktop reference. It contains loads of SQL commands and it shows how to use them for different database packages, like MySQL.
Rating:
Summary: Cross platform syntax reference
Review: This is a solid desk reference for SQL syntax which provides invaluable material on the portability of each type of statement. The heart of the book is the four hundred pages of statement reference. Each statement is described with it's syntax and options. Then the support for each database (DB2, MySQL, Oracle, PostgresSQL, and SQL Server) is described in detail. There is a similar 120 page reference on SQL functions.
This is classic O'Reilly. The text is well written, and the book is very dense and well organized. There is a little introductory material but the heart of the book is the statement and function reference. You will get the most out of this book if you already have a reasonable understanding of SQL. This is not a book for beginners.
This would make an ideal desktop reference, particularly for someone working in a cross-platform environment that goes directly to the SQL.
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