Audience for This Book

This text is unique in that the target audience is wide, but the quality of the material presented is not compromised. Consider that both complex and simple solutions are provided, and that solutions for five different vendors are available when a common solution does not exist. The target audience is indeed wide:

The SQL novice

Perhaps you have just purchased a text on learning SQL, or you are fresh into your first semester of a required database course and you want to supplement your new knowledge with some challenging real world examples. Maybe you've seen a query that magically transforms rows to columns, or that parses a serialized string into a result set. The recipes in this book explain techniques for performing these seemingly impossible queries.

The non-SQL programmer

Perhaps your background is in another language and you've been thrown into the fire at your current job and are expected to support complex SQL written by someone else. The recipes shown in this book, particularly in the later chapters, break down complex queries and provide a gentle walk-through to help you understand complex code that you may have inherited.

The SQL journeyman

For the intermediate SQL developer, this book is the gold at the end of the rainbow (OK, maybe that's too strong; please forgive an author's enthusiasm for his topic). In particular, if you've been coding SQL for quite some time and have not found your way onto window functions, you're in for a treat. For example, the days of needing temporary tables to store intermediate results are over; window functions can get you to an answer in a single query! Allow me to again state that I have no intention of trying to force-feed my ideas to an already experienced practitioner. Instead, consider this book as a way to update your skill set if you haven't caught on to some of the newer additions to the SQL language.

The SQL expert

Undoubtedly you've seen these recipes before, and you probably have your own variations. Why, then, is this book useful to you? Perhaps you've been a SQL expert on one platform your whole career, say, SQL Server, and now wish to learn Oracle. Perhaps you've only ever used MySQL, and you wonder what the same solutions in PostgreSQL would look like. This text covers different relational database management systems (RDBMSs) and displays their solutions side by side. Here's your chance to expand your knowledge base.