Skip to Content
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

5.3. Functions

Before pocket calculators became cheap and powerful, we used lookup tables in books. Go to a used bookstore, pick up an old finance, trig, or statistics book, and look in the back. There will be tables of functions for net present value, sine and cosine, and assorted statistical tests. The most famous book was CRC Standard Mathematical Tables and Formulae for tables. The 31st edition was published in 1995, which gives you an idea how long it has been around. You can now get it on a CD.

The obvious question is why I would want to implement a function as a lookup table when I have fast, cheap computing power. One good reason is that if you only use a few thousand values of the function, they will fit into main storage, where they ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Joe Celko's SQL Programming Style

Joe Celko's SQL Programming Style

Joe Celko
PostgreSQL Query Optimization: The Ultimate Guide to Building Efficient Queries

PostgreSQL Query Optimization: The Ultimate Guide to Building Efficient Queries

Henrietta Dombrovskaya, Boris Novikov, Anna Bailliekova
Effective SQL: 61 Specific Ways to Write Better SQL, First Edition

Effective SQL: 61 Specific Ways to Write Better SQL, First Edition

John L. Viescas, Douglas J. Steele, Ben G. Clothier

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780080557526