Beginner Database Design & SQL Programming Using Microsoft SQL Server 2014

Description

LIVE THE AMERICAN DREAM! Earn from $100,000 to $200,000 as a database expert. Learn Microsoft Database Design & SQL Server 2014 Programming! SQL Server 2014 follows just in 2 years after SQL Server 2012 with very exciting new features. One on the top: in-memory OLTP tables for superior performance. With abundant computer memory, why keep tables on a slow disk? Developers across the world face database issues daily. While immersed in procedural languages with loops, RDBMS forces them to think in terms of sets without loops. It takes to transition. It takes training. It takes experience. Developers are exposed also to Excel worksheets, or spreadsheets, as they were called in the not so distant past. So, if you know worksheets, how hard can databases be? After all, worksheets look pretty much like database tables, don’t they? The big difference is the connections among well-designed tables. A database is a set of connected tables, which represent entities in the real world. A database can be 100 connected tables or 3000. The connection is very simple: row A in table Alpha has affiliated data with row B in table Beta. However, even with 200 tables and 300 connections (FOREIGN KEY references), it takes a good amount of time to become familiar to the point of having an acceptable working knowledge."The Cemetery of Computer Languages" is expanding. You can see tombstones like PL/1, Forth, Ada, Pascal, LISP, RPG, APL, SNOBOL, JOVIAL, Algol – the list goes on. For some, the future is in question: PowerBuilder, ColdFusion, FORTRAN, and COBOL. On the other hand, SQL is running strong after 3 decades of glorious existence. What is the difference? The basic difference is that SQL can handle large datasets in a consistent manner based on mathematical foundations. You can throw together a computer language easily: assignment statements, looping, if-then conditional, 300 library functions, and voila! Here is the new language: Mars/1, named after the red planet to be fashionable with NASA's new Mars robot. However, can Mars/1 JOIN a table of 1 million rows with a table of 10 million rows in a second? The success of SQL language is so compelling that other technologies are tagged onto it like XML/XQuery, which deals with semi-structured information objects. In SQL you are thinking at a high level. In C# or Java, you are dealing with details – lots of them. That is a major difference. Why is so much of the book dedicated to database design? Why not plunge into SQL coding and eventually the developer will get a hang of the design? Because high-level thinking requires thinking at the database design level. A farmer has six mules. H how do we model it in the database? We design the Farmer and FarmAnimal tables and then connect them with FarmerID FOREIGN KEY in FarmAnimal referencing the FarmerID PRIMARY KEY in the Farmer table. What is the big deal about it? It looks so simple. In fact, how about just calling the tables Table1 and Table2 to be more generic. Ouch! Meaningful naming is the very basis of good database design. Relational database design is truly simple for simple well-understood models. The challenge starts in modeling complex objects such as financial derivative instruments, airplane passenger scheduling, or a social network website. When you need to add 5 new tables to a 1000 table database and hook them in (define FOREIGN KEY references) correctly, it is a huge challenge. To begin with, some of the five new tables may already be redundant, but you don't know that until you understand what the 1000 tables are really storing. Frequently, learning the application area is the biggest challenge for a developer when starting a new job. Live Life Smart, Active, Agile, Brilliant, Healthy & Happy! Review: Not at all for beginners - This book is not at all meant for beginners to the SQL ecosystem. If the book were not positioned as a beginner book, I would be more forgiving in my review. The book might be better positioned as valuable reading for someone switching from another database platform (like myself coming from MySQL) to Microsoft SQL. The author, who is clearly very experienced, is unable to relate to how a novice in this area might read this book. As an example, here is an excerpt from the introduction, " [...] RDBMS forces them to think in terms of sets without loops." At no point does the author define what the RDBMS acronym stands for. Later, the author talks about lightweight SQL vs T-SQL. Is a novice supposed to know the difference? There isn't even a one sentence description about how Microsoft added extensions to plain vanilla SQL in the introductory chapters. The book is full of much more egregious 'pacing' issues. For example, by page 10 of this book, the reader is already being shown queries using INNER JOIN, GROUP BY, and ORDER BY. For a novice reader, he/she can only imagine what remains in the other 600 pages of this 'beginner' text. The very first chapter of the book starts with a 20 line query that I can guarantee is completely incomprehensible to a novice. The subsequent pages show a table schema with something like 9 different tables all related via primary and foreign keys. What in the world is a novice supposed to gain with these diagrams? There is only a sentence each about what a primary key and foreign key are and *no* explanation as to why they are important. Honestly, this was upsetting to see. Beyond my (fairly serious) issues with the pacing of this beginners book, there are many typos and the author would be served well by using a proof reader for subsequent editions of this text. I simply can't recommend this book for the book's intended audience. Review: Detailed but complicated - Complicated - not a beginners book