SQL Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Preface

SQL is the lingua franca of the data professional. At the same time, it doesn’t always get the attention it deserves compared to the hot tool du jour. As result, it’s common to find people who use SQL frequently but rarely or never go beyond the simplest queries, often enough because they believe that’s all there is.

This book shows how much SQL can do, expanding users’ tool boxes. By the end of the book you will have seen how SQL can be used for statistical analysis; to do reporting in a manner similar to Business Intelligence tools; to match text data; to perform sophisticated analysis on date data; and much more.

The first edition of SQL Cookbook has been a popular choice as the “second book on SQL”—the book people read after they learn the basics—since its original release. It has many strengths, such as its wide range of topics and its friendly style.

However, computing is known to move fast, even when it comes to something as mature as SQL, which has roots going back to the 1970s. While this new edition doesn’t cover brand new language features, an important change is that features that were novel at the time of the first edition, and found in some implementations and not in others, are now stabilized and standardized. As a result, we have a lot more scope for developing standard solutions than was possible earlier.

There are two key examples that are important to highlight. Common table expressions (CTEs), including recursive CTEs, were available in a couple of ...