SQL Book Reviews

We'll review here those texts which are, or claim to be, about standard SQL. We try to be current, but we do not always go out and buy the latest edition of every book, especially if we disliked the last edition. We try to be fair, but disclaim responsibility for any errors or omissions. This page has three sections: THE TOP 25 SQL BOOKS, BOOKS AVAILABLE ONLINE, DOCUMENTATION OF THE SQL STANDARD.

THE TOP 25 SQL BOOKS. We power searched the amazon.com database for SQL, deliberately excluding any title containing a vendor name or any publication date more than 2 years ago. (To be exact, we searched for title: sql and not keywords: (oracle or microsoft or informix or basic or server or db2 or 7) and pubdate: after 1998). These were our results, in order by average user rating:

SQL Queries for Mere Mortals. Hernandez and Viescas. 5 stars. Microsoft-oriented focus on translating English questions into SQL SELECT statements. Download a zipped excerpt. Hernandez wrote another book which is on our DBMS Book Reviews page, and also The Complete SQL Series Training Course. Read Seewer's review.
Special Edition Using SQL. Colburn. 5 stars. Read Jamison's review.
Understanding SQL and Java Together. Melton et al. 5 stars. Mr Melton is on the ANSI standards committee. Read Duguay's review.
Sams Teach Yourself SQL In 10 Minutes. Forta. 4.5 stars. There are big gaps (for example I saw nothing about EXISTS or GRANT), the language is pre-SQL-99 (for example "ORDER BY 2,3" is okay), syntax can be vendor-specific (for example the use of "+" for concatenation), the text can be vague (for example the definition for "primary key" would be true for "unique key" too). Of course, Forta's design goal was to make the book tiny, so I can't fault him for missing things. If you're new and really can't spend more than 10 minutes (per chapter), this book is written for you. Read Shaun Smith's review.
SQL-99 Complete, Really. Gulutzan and Pelzer. 4.5 stars. Read Appendix F: Glossary. This is the largest book (1078 pages), and the only one that discusses the latest official standard in detail.
The Practical SQL Handbook: SQL Variants Darnovsky, Bowman, Emerson. 4.5 stars. 4th edition. June 2001. Read Feldman's review. Read DiBona's review. Don't read McCool's review.
Joe Celko's SQL For Smarties. Celko. 4 stars. Read accu's review. Read Mr Celko's regular column online in the premier database magazine Intelligent Enterprise Journal.
SQL: The Complete Reference Groff and Weinberg. 4 stars. 2nd edition. The CD-ROM has demos of the big 5 SQL DBMSs.
SQL Fundamentals. Patrick. 4 stars. Emphasizes Access and Oracle. Download a PDF sample chapter. The most recent review is on slashdot.org. You can read Trojanovich's review but Trojanovich is just a beginner. You should read Ocelot's review.
Advanced ANSI SQL Data Modeling and Structure. David. 4 stars.
The Teradata Database: Introduction and SQL. Marshall. 4 stars. We forgot to exclude Teradata in our search, but decided it would be unfair to change the criteria after seeing the results.
SQL In A Nutshell. Kline. 3.5 stars. Download a PDF sample chapter. We didn't like one of the sample chapters from the pre-release; we sent a letter to the publisher; the errors we mentioned were fixed and we have now received a reply; so we give points for customer service. We liked Nigel Martin's review. We disliked Christopher Shaw's review.
Sams Teach Yourself SQL In 24 Hours, 2nd edition. Plew et al. 3.5 stars. Read the geek review. Read the vnunet review.
Mastering SQL. Gruber. 3.5 stars. Currently out of stock, but that might be temporary.
Developing Time-Oriented Database Applications in SQL. Snodgrass. 3.5 stars. Read an excerpt.
An Introduction to SQL. Van Der Lans. 3.5 stars. Read accu's review.
SQL Unleashed, Second Edition. Youness et al. 3 stars. Read Ed's review of the first edition.
SQL For Dummies. Taylor. 3 stars. In our opinion, 3 stars is too many. Read Ocelot's review of the first edition. Don't read a favourable review.
SQL Programming From The Ground Up. Pyefinch. 3 stars. The intro promises standard SQL but many syntax examples, especially for functions, are some proprietary dialect. SQL3 (i.e. SQL-99) features are mentioned in an appendix.
SQL Instant Reference. Gruber. 3 stars. Quote from Ocelot's review of an earlier edition: "Topics are arranged alphabetically. There are enough errors to make the book a poor reference. Almost all of the material is also in Date and Darwen's book, minus the mistakes. Rating: Acceptable."
Transact-SQL Programming. Kline et al. 2.5 stars. Read an excerpt.
Sams Teach Yourself SQL In 21 Days, Fourth Edition. Stephens and Plew. 2.5 stars. Read the Second Edition of this book, now available online.
SQL/400 By Example. Coolbaugh. 2.5 stars.

THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK OF 2003

We believe that the most important book of the year will be: SQL Performance Tuning. Peter Gulutzan and Trudy Pelzer, (Addison-Wesley). The long-awaited sequel to "Optimizing SQL" which PC Techniques Magazine described as "everything you wanted to know about SQL and some stuff you don't". Read early technical reviews and table of contents. Highly recommended! Order now before amazon runs out of copies.

BOOKS AVAILABLE ONLINE. These books about SQL are either online or downloadable:

Birchall's DB2 cookbook
Stephens and Plew's Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 21 Days, Second Edition
IBM's IBM DB2

You can download chapters of some other SQL books for a fee from informit.

DOCUMENTATION OF THE SQL STANDARD. SQL is an officially standardized language. The current standard (which formerly was known as SQL3) is now known as SQL:1999 or SQL-99. You can get more information about the SQL standard from other pages on this site, such as the glossary or the SQL Links list or the descriptions of OCELOT features (Ocelot is the only vendor which follows the standard completely). You can order hardcopy documents from Global Engineering (search for document number ISO 9075), or order PDF downloads from an unrated site: TechStreet. However, since the official ANSI/ISO documents are notoriously difficult to read, it's better to buy a guide. The four guides are known by their authors' names: "Cannan and Otten", "Date and Darwen", "Gulutzan and Pelzer", "Melton and Simon". Another (" Kulkarni") is as yet unreviewed.

Stephen Cannan and Gerard Otten, SQL - The Standard Handbook; Mcgraw-Hill, 1993. We haven't read this, but we took some notes in the bookstore while pretending to browse. Discussing UPPER and LOWER functions, they include a shocking detail that Date and Darwen omitted. There's a full description of all information_schema tables (another thing that's missing in Date and Darwen), but it's lifted from the standard with insufficient accompanying explanation. They give "DROP CHARACTER SET EBCDIC" as an example of a legal statement; we believe it will always cause a runtime error. We could also quibble with their ideas of "what's a legal identifier" and "what objects are by default deferrable". We only saw one typo in a half hour of browsing. Rating: looks Good but we didn't buy it -- the bookstore wanted too much money. [Dated; hard to get nowadays.]
C.J.Date with Hugh Darwen, A Guide To The SQL Standard, Fourth Edition; Addison-Wesley, 1997. Could use more examples, and could contain more details, and could be less critical. But these guys know their topic, they cover it all, and they spent some care getting it right. Rating: Very good. Read Jones's review.
Peter Gulutzan and Trudy Pelzer, SQL-99 Complete, Really; R&D Books, 1999. Let's make a fair disclosure here: Gulutzan and Pelzer worked for Ocelot, and Ocelot maintains the web site you're looking at. Nevertheless, we recommend this book on objective grounds: (a) it's up to date with the latest version of the standard, (b) it's gigantic, (c) it's recommended by at least one member of the ANSI/ISO standards committee.
Jim Melton and Alan R. Simon, Understanding the new SQL - a complete guide; Morgan Kaufmann, 1993. Mr Melton played a large part in the creation of the SQL-92 document, so we originally gave this a Rating: Probably Okay. That rating is now revised to Good. Read Ocelot's review from the April 1998 issue of THE CAT'S MEOW. Two more recent books by Jim Melton: SQL:1999 Understanding Relational Language Components, Advanced SQL:1999 - Understanding Object-Relational And Other Advanced Features

SOME OTHER SQL BOOKS. The following books don't fit in the criteria above, but we have read them so we pass on our comments here.

Joe Celko, Instant SQL Programming; Wrox, 1995. More readable than Date and Darwen's book, but to some extent that's because it's not as thorough. We reviewed the first edition of his book and found flaws, but we have been told that the flaws were all corrected in the second edition. On that assurance, we give this book a Rating: Good. Read Holmes's review.

Sandra Emerson and Marcy Darnovsky and Judith Bowman, The Practical SQL Handbook; Addison-Wesley, 1996. The back of the title page might say "Copyright 1996" and "First Printing 1996", but we saw the real first edition in 1989. It was about a quirky non-standard SQL. Many SQL experts regard the book as good; it's popular.

James Groff and Paul Weinberg, LAN Times Guide To SQL; Osborne-McGraw-Hill, 1994. A good intro for administrators; a poor reference. Rating: Poor. Read Ocelot's review.

Ron Soukup and Kalen Delaney, Inside Microsoft SQL Server 7.0; Microsoft, 1999. As the title hints, this is about what's "inside" the architecture, by a partisan Microsofter. Rating: good for extremely advanced programmers. Read Holmberg's review of an earlier edition.

Some new books that have appeared in the last few months are: Understanding Relational Database Query Languages (Dietrich); Beginning SQL Programming (Kauffman et al) (read table of contents). In December 2001 Konrad King's SQL Tips And Techniques appeared.

See also our related pages: Database Book Reviews, ADO Book Reviews, Java and SQL Book Reviews.

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