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Joe Celko's Thinking in Sets: Auxiliary, Temporal, and Virtual Tables in SQL
book

Joe Celko's Thinking in Sets: Auxiliary, Temporal, and Virtual Tables in SQL

by Joe Celko
January 2008
Intermediate to advanced
384 pages
8h 1m
English
Morgan Kaufmann
Content preview from Joe Celko's Thinking in Sets: Auxiliary, Temporal, and Virtual Tables in SQL

Chapter 1. SQL Is Declarative, Not Procedural

IN THE PREFACE I told a short story about FORTRAN programmers who could only solve problems using loops and a LISP programmer who could only solve problems recursively. This is not uncommon because we love the tools we know. Let me tell a joke instead of a story: A mathematician, a physicist, and a database programmer were all given a rubber ball and told to find the volume.

The mathematician carefully measured the diameter and either evaluated the volume of sphere formula or used a triple integral if the ball was not perfectly round.

The physicist filled a beaker with water, put the ball in the water, and measured the total displacement. He does not care about the details of the shape of the ball. ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780080557526