SQL and Relational Theory, 2nd Edition

Appendix G. Suggestions for Further Reading

As the title says, this appendix gives some suggestions for further reading. Let me immediately apologize for the fact that so many of the publications listed are ones for which I’m either the author or a coauthor ... The publications are listed in alphabetical order by author and chronological order within author. Note: This book isn’t concerned with specific SQL products, and I therefore don’t mention any specific product publications in this appendix. But many such publications exist, and you’ll probably want to refer to one or more of them as well if you want to apply the ideas discussed in the present book to some individual project or 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 extract 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 ...