Educational Imaginations

SQL Primer Available

front1 Note 15 June 2009: The entire book is now available for download from the SQL Primer tab.

In March 2001 just before I returned to the Northeast (U.S.) to start a new job, I wrote and published a book called Oracle SQL Primer: Learning the Craft. This one has favorite status in my heart. In a geeky kind of way, it’s a wonderful book … even if I do say so myself.

The book presents a philosophy of writing queries, so you can do useful things with data normally bound into large databases. The environment happens to be Oracle and SQL, but there’s an artistry … a craft, if you will, of writing any query. It’s the beauty and art of query writing that makes me fond of this book.

Unfortunately the new job took control of my life, and I never marketed the book. Consequently it barely sold in comparison to two earlier books about SQL that I wrote. In 2005 I closed Komenda Inc., the company that published the book and through which I did contract consulting. At that point the book went out of print. Only a few dozen copies of the print edition still exist.

It recently occurred to me that someone might still benefit from the book. Eight years old is an eternity for a computer book and, certainly, Oracle and SQL have progressed beyond their representation in Oracle SQL Primer. But there is still much that can be learned from this book. I’ve worked with hundreds of developers who write SQL, and I think it’s fair to say that even the most advanced of them find that the philosophy of query writing is new and valuable.

At this point, I’m still working to provide one of the appendices. Hopefully that will be available soon. The problem is that I’m taking the printer’s final PDF files from an old PC running Windows 98 that has not been powered up in 4 years. So the file transfers have been an … interesting … experience. If I’m able to retrieve this final file, I’ll bundle all the PDF’s together so the book can be downloaded in total.

Like the rest of the original material on this blog site, I’ve licensed Oracle SQL Primer under a Creative Commons Attribution license. If you’re unfamiliar with this license, click on the image below. I got into the publishing business because the author’s contract I was offered for my first book was so egregious that I just said, “Don’t be silly.” So I published it myself with Komenda, which was named after a small fishing village in Ghana where I spent 2 magical years in the Peace Corps during the late 1960’s.

If anyone finds the book useful, I’d love to hear from you.