MacLochlainns Weblog

My new Oracle Database 11g & MySQL 5.6 Developer Handbook will be available at Oracle Open World 2011 (OOW2011). It’s a great book to compare and contrast approaches in Oracle and MySQL. It covers Oracle SQL & PL/SQL and MySQL SQL & SQL/PSM (Persistent Stored Modules – functions and procedures). Unfortunately, it seems like the book won’t be available on amazon.com until much later in the month, and not available from amazon.de until November. You can read about it at McGraw Hill Professional’s web site. They’ve made a special effort to get copies to OOW2011. Here’s the source code for the book because I don’t know when it’ll be on the publisher’s web site.

I’ll also be at OOW2011. They’ve scheduled me in the bookstore (probably 2^nd floor of Moscone North, as usual) from 10 to 10:30 A.M. on Monday and Wednesday for a book signing. If you’re at OOW2011 and you like to stop by and say hello, I look forward to meeting you. Many folks leave comments on the posts but only a few suggest what they’d like me to write on when I’ve got a chance, and you can do that if you stop by to chat.

It’s also interesting to know how many folks use both Oracle and MySQL (any updates on that are always appreciated). Last year at the Bioinformatics and Computation Biology (ACM-BCB 2010) Conference in Niagara Falls, I found it interesting to discover how many pharmaceutical companies and national labs were using both Oracle and MySQL. They appeared consistent about using Oracle for their systems governed by legal compliance rules and MySQL for actual research.

The pharmaceutical companies also had clear barriers between the researchers and professional IT staff, specifically the DBAs. It seems that the DBAs don’t want to cede any control over installed Oracle instances, and they place barriers to research by denying additional Oracle instances when their site licenses would allow them to do so at no incremental cost. On the other hand, the DBAs are fine with letting researchers host and pilot with the MySQL Community Edition databases. This book supports those trying to figure out how to write portable SQL and how to port solutions from MySQL to Oracle and vice versa.

Hope to meet a few new folks at OOW2011. The Kindle version of the book became available 11/25/2011.

As an addendum to this original post, some folks asked for the summary of content for the new book, and the location of the errata (the errors of omission and commission in the book). Below is a summary of the book from page XVIII of the Introduction, and the errata is in the second comment to this post:

Part I: Development Components

• Chapter 1, “Architectures,” explains the Oracle 11g and MySQL 5.6 development architectures and highlights the comparative aspects of both client and server environments.
• Chapter 2, “Client Interfaces,” explains and demonstrates the basics of how you use SQL*Plus and MySQL Monitor client software.
• Chapter 3, “Security,” explains the security barriers for database servers and Data Control Language (DCL) commands that let you manage user and account privileges in the database servers.
• Chapter 4, “Transactions,” explains the nature of ACID-compliant transactions and the Two-phase Commit (2PC) process demonstrated by INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements.
• Chapter 5, “Constraints,” explains the five primary database-level constraints and covers the check, not null, unique, primary key, and foreign key constraints.

Part II: SQL Development

• Chapter 6, “Creating Users and Structures,” explains how you can create users, databases, tables, sequences, and indexes.
• Chapter 7, “Modifying Users and Structures,” explains how you modify users, databases, tables, sequences, and indexes.
• Chapter 8, “Inserting Data,” explains how you insert data into tables.
• Chapter 9, “Updating Data,” explains how you update data in tables.
• Chapter 10, “Deleting Data,” explains how you delete data from tables.
• Chapter 11, “Querying Data,” explains how you query data from a single table, from a join of two or more tables, and from a join of two or more queries through set operators.
• Chapter 12, “Merging Data,” explains how you import denormalized data from external tables or source files and insert or update records in normalized tables.

Part III: Stored Program Development

• Chapter 13, “PL/SQL Basics,” explains the basics of using PL/SQL to write transactional blocks of code.
• Chapter 14, “SQL/PSM Basics,” explains the basics of using SQL/PSM to write transactional blocks of code.
• Chapter 15, “Triggers,” explains how to write database triggers in Oracle and MySQL databases.

Part IV: Appendix

• Appendix, Covers the answers to the mastery questions at the end of the chapters.