You Don’t Know SQL

Or maybe you do. However, I’ve talked to a lot of DBAs (pretty much the target audience for this blog) and you might be surprised how often the SQL skills of your average DBAs dwindle over time. In today’s role-specific market, developers do developer stuff while DBAs do database stuff. Somewhere in between falls SQL – the red-headed stepchild of the programming world. Ask a DBA and they’ll probably say SQL is a legitimate fourth generation language. Tell a Java programmer that and they’ll laugh themselves into a seizure. It’s strange that DBAs become less familiar with SQL over time, since it’s probably the first thing you learned when you were an Oracle newbie. Maybe you learned about pmon and archivelog mode first, but more likely you struggled with how to use a SELECT statement to form a join between two tables. I know that’s how I started.


So that leads me into my excuse for not posting, lo, these many months. It’s because I wrote a book. A book about SQL. The fine folks at Packt Publishing approached me at the end of 2010 and asked me to write the first in a series of books to help folks earn an Oracle Certification. I’ve been teaching students that stuff for eight years, so it seemed like a good fit. This book, aptly named “OCA Oracle Database 11g: SQL Fundamentals I: A Real World Certification Guide” was published a few weeks ago, and may also hold the record for the longest title in history for an Oracle book.

This is the link to the book on Packt's site  and this is the link on Amazon

Here is the lovely cover.

I'd take my "bridge to nowhere" picture over some weird animal cover any day.  I'm talking to you, O'Reilly Publishing...


I’ll write more about the book soon, but my point here is about the subject of the book – SQL. If you’re a DBA, you might be able to do a nifty join between v$process and v$session to find the database username and OS process id of a user, but could you write it in Oracle’s new join syntax? Do you know how a correlated subquery works? Ever try a conditional insert with an INSERT...WHEN statement? No? Then buy my book and all these mysteries will be revealed!

Seriously, though, even if you’re not interested in being certified and your daily job description doesn’t include any correlated subqueries, it never hurts to be reminded that SQL is actually *why* we have relational databases in the first place. An Oracle DBA should always try to understand as much about Oracle as he or she can. So don't go to rust – bust out those mad SQL skillz!