Unlike Oracle, MS SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres etc., Ingres has only had a few books written about it over the years.
Perhaps that's not such a bad thing, when you consider how many thick, boring and generally useless doorstops are produced on the subject each and every year.
This book, The SQL Guide to Ingres, is big, in fact its very big; but unlike most other books of its ilk, this one is packed from cover to cover with page after page of useful and informative facts about Ingres SQL and how to get the most out of it.
Ingres' own documentation may have everything that you need to install and use Ingres, but this book helps to tie it all together and can get you up to speed much, much quicker.
This book is as much of a "must have" for new users as it is for seasoned gurus I recommend it to all users of Ingres.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Rick van der Lans' earlier books on SQL are well-known and highly popular, some appearing in a third or even fourth edition. The SQL Guide to Ingres is his latest, and it does two rather remarkable things: first it is a very sound introduction to the fundamentals of SQL database technology, which is a rare feat by itself, and second it is a thorough tutorial in the use of the Ingres database management system.
Anyone using or evaluating Ingres will find this book immensely valuable. Beginners just learning SQL will benefit not only from the accurate and well-paced instruction in what SQL is and how to use it, they will also incidentally benefit from learning one of the most standards-compliant dialects of SQL, and from gaining familiarity with an open source DBMS that is robust enough to run mission-critical systems but available for free.
Even someone like myself who has been using and teaching Ingres for more than 20 years will value the treatment this book gives more advanced or specialized topics like non-ASCII character sets or collating sequences. There were several times when I read a claim in the book and thought, "That can't be right", but when I tested it, it worked as described!
Users coming to Ingres from other database management systems will find the explanation of features not covered by any ANSI/ISO standards, like the Ingres server architecture; query and security auditing, or bulk data loading, very much easier to grasp from this book than by trying to sift the voluminous documentation.
There are a few very minor flaws in this book; for instance it talks about the non-standard (and deprecated) CREATE INTEGRITY statement, which is probably not necessary and could possibly mislead a novice to think it is an acceptable alternative to using ANSI/ISO constraints. It also talks of row constructors at one point, before abruptly announcing that Ingres doesn't (yet) support them. The worst gaff is probably the claim that one should routinely turn off query-flattening using the SET NOFLATTEN statement--which is excessively sweeping advice, intended to protect against a relatively obscure kind of coding error going undetected. But if that is the worst error the book makes then it has done very well indeed.
Everyone from beginner to guru will find something new and useful in this book. I recommend it highly.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Amazon Home
