Mastering SQL

Mastering SQL is the ideal resource for all your SQL programming needs. Comprehensive, authoritative, and product independent, this book offers a practical approach to this all-important programming and query language. Inside, you'll learn SQL by using SQL--to develop database applications, administer databases, and work interactively with data. As you go, you'll benefit from the author's clear explanations of relational database technology's conceptual underpinnings, and you'll acquire an approach to problem solving that will help you apply SQL techniques as effectively as possible. The book assumes no prior background but covers the language thoroughly. In addition to the hands-on tutorial material, the book provides a complete SQL reference. This is not a book you will quickly outgrow.

Coverage includes:

• Developing applications that use SQL
  
• Designing and implementing databases
  
• Performing operations on data
  
• Analyzing and deriving data using complex queries
  
• Combining SQL with other languages
  
• Building applications that generate SQL dynamically
  
• Enforcing business rules on data
  
• Finding and correcting data anomalies
  
• Resolving concurrency issues
  
• Handling database errors programmatically
  
• Optimizing SQL operations
  
• Using dynamic and embedded SQL
  
• Combining SQL and Java -- SQLJ and JDBC

Featured on the CD
IBM's DB2 Universal Database Version 6.1 for Linux and Sybase's SQL Active Server Anywhere for Linux

Table of contents

Introduction

Part I: Introducing SQL

Chapter 1: Introducing Relational Databases

Chapter 2: SQL: An Overview

Part II: Creating a Database

Chapter 3: Creating, Changing, and Dropping Tables

Chapter 4: Constraining the Values of Your Data

Chapter 5: Maintaining Referential Integrity

Chapter 6: Entering, Deleting, and Changing Data

Part III: Queries

Chapter 7: Using SQL to Retrieve Information from Tables

Chapter 8: Using IN, BETWEEN, LIKE, IS NULL, and Aggregate Functions

Chapter 9: Working with Expressions

Chapter 10: Querying Multiple Tables at Once

Chapter 11: Placing Queries Inside One Another

Chapter 12: Using Subquery Operators

Chapter 13: Merging Multiple Queries

Index