SQL and Relational Theory

Appendix D. Suggestions for Further Reading

AS ITS TITLE STATES, THIS APPENDIX GIVES SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING. I apologize for the fact that the majority of the publications listed are ones for which I’m either the author or a coauthor… They’re in alphabetical order by author name, and ascending chronological order within author. Note: This book isn’t concerned with specific SQL products, and I therefore don’t list any product-specific publications below. But many such publications exist, and you’ll probably want to refer to one or more of them if you want to apply the ideas discussed in the present book to some individual product.

1. Surajit Chaudhuri and Gerhard Weikum: “Rethinking Database System Architecture: Towards a Self-tuning RISC-style Database System,” Proc. 26th Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases, Cairo, Egypt (September 2000).

   Among other things, this paper strongly endorses one of the messages of the present book: viz., that (as I put it in the preface) “SQL is … complicated, confusing, and error prone—much more so, I venture to suggest, than its apologists would have you believe.” Here’s an extended quote from the introduction to the paper:

   SQL is painful. A big headache that comes with a database system is the SQL language. It is the union of all conceivable features (many of which are rarely used or should be discouraged to use anyway) and is way too complex for the typical application developer. Its core, say selection-projection-join queries and aggregation, ...