SQL and Relational Theory, 3rd Edition

Appendix G

Suggestions for Further Reading

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him;for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

—Samuel Johnson: quoted in Life of Johnson, by James Boswell (1791)

As the title says, this appendix gives some suggestions for further reading. The publications are listed in alphabetical order by author and chronological order within author.¹ Note: This book isn’t concerned with specific SQL products, and I therefore don’t mention any product oriented publications in this appendix. But many such publications exist, and I’m sure you’ll 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 this book—viz., that SQL is complicated, confusing, and error prone. Here’s what Chaudhuri and Weikum have to say on the matter: “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, is extremely useful, but we ...