Mastering Oracle SQL

Sanjay Mishra, Alan Beaulieu9780596001292, 0596001290

If you write programs to run against an Oracle database, you spend a lot of time and mental energy writing queries to return the data your programs need. Knowledge of SQL, and particularly of Oracle’s implementation of SQL, is the key to writing good queries in a timely manner. In this book, the authors share their knowledge of Oracle SQL, and show you many creative techniques that you can use to advantage in your own applications.This book shows you how to: * Leverage Oracle’s vast library of built-in SQL functions * Query time-based data, and write joins involving date and time ranges * Use Oracle SQL’s hierarchical query features to deal with data best represented in a tree format * Use DECODE and CASE to implement conditional logic in your queries * Use Oracle’s new, analytic SQL features to write ranking queries, lag and lead queries, windowing queries, and more * Join data from two or more tables using the newly supported SQL92 join syntaxIn addition, you’ll see how SQL can best be integrated with PL/SQL. You’ll also learn various best practices to help you write SQL queries that perform efficiently.Precious few books on the market today go beyond discussing syntax and the barest rudiments of using Oracle SQL. This book changes that, showing you how to creatively leverage the full power of SQL to write queries in an Oracle environment.

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Table of contents :
Cover……Page 1
About the Authors……Page 3
Dedication……Page 4
Table of Contents……Page 6
Preface……Page 9
1. Introduction to SQL……Page 16
2. The WHERE Clause……Page 29
3. Joins……Page 41
4. Group Operations……Page 70
5. Subqueries……Page 83
6. Handling Temporal Data……Page 110
7. Set Operations……Page 159
8. Hierarchical Queries……Page 172
9. DECODE and CASE……Page 190
10. Partitions, Objects, and Collections……Page 207
11. PL/SQL……Page 228
12. Advanced Group Operations……Page 243
13. Advanced Analytic SQL……Page 282
14. SQL Best Practices……Page 312
Index……Page 323