I have worked with relational databases for a number of years, but have never bothered to really ‘get’ in to relational databases best practices. This year I decided it was the year I would put some effort in.
I’m really glad I went for Bill’s book first. I found reading about the antipatterns was a very effective way to get into the mindset of what the good patterns should be. I found the book to have a really good balance between stories and technical examples - I loved the introductions to each chapter. I came across a number of things I have done wrong in the past and ways I could avoid these going forward.
I would recommend this book to anyone who is at the level where they recognize SQL - I found I didn’t need to be proficient in SQL to get value from his points - in fact I feel Bill hit on the principles really well - which makes this book really good for anyone working with pretty much any relational database regardless of vendor.
I found myself disagreeing with a handful of points that Bill made regarding self documenting code - but nothing overwhelming. I also found the warm fuzzy feeling come over me that DBA are also programmers when I read his section on Application Development Antipatterns.
Notes
- p.g. 23 on Naive Trees was a good read on tables that refernce themselves to get a tree relationship
- p.g. 112 Floats and rounding errors
- p.g. 141 MENTOR your indexes
- p.g. 150 Discussion of use of NULL’s
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ISBN-13: 978-1934356555
