This latest edition of the best-selling implementation guide to the Structured Query Language teaches SQL fundamentals while providing practical solutions for critical business applications. The Practical SQL Handbook, Fourth Edition now includes expanded platform SQL coverage and extensive real-world examples based on feedback from actual SQL users.

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From the Book:WHY NEW EDITIONS? Many things have changed since this book was first published in 1989, and SQL is no exception. It has expanded tremendously, both in numbers of users and in numbers of commands. Sales of relational databases are steadily growing. When we wrote the first edition of The Practical SQL Handbook, the American National Standards Institute {ANSI) had already passed the 1986 standard. The International Standards Organization (ISO) adopted it in 1987. Both ANSI and ISO were working on the 1989 version. The 1986 standards were skimpy, lacking features that most commercial vendors offered. The 1989 standards were more complete, but still left many important elements undefined. What actually mattered at that time was the de facto industry standard: each vendor kept a wary eye on what the others were doing and made core offerings similar enough to attract (with claims of compatibility) both customers migrating from competitors and new users looking for database systems they could build on. Because of this, we left both the not-quite-jelled ANSI standards and particular vendor implementations to the experts in those fields and concentrated on the common ground: generic or "industry standard" SQL. Our goal was to offer the intelligent amateur practical information on how to use the actually available SQL of that time. The 1992 ANSI standard [often called SQ-2 or SQL-92) represents a new stage in SQL development. It's much fuller than the 1989 standard, containing more than four times as many pages as the earlier version. Database vendors have adopted large parts of the 1992 standard. The industry and the ANSI/ISO standards areconverging. Nonetheless, there is still a general, industry-wide core of SQL commands that all users need to understand. Adopting standards doesn't happen overnight; it is a long process. At any point, vendors will have varying levels of conformance. SQL users can still benefit from mastering the fundamentals of the language before investigating the specifics of particular implementations. THE SECOND EDITION In reviewing what was available for SQL users, we found the same holes in 1993 as in 1989: very little practical advice on how to use the language. There are a number of good books on specific implementations {check your local library or bookstore for a list) and several complete treatments of the language from a standards point of view (notably Date and Darwin's A Guide to the SQL Standard, Third Edition Addison-Wesley, 1993) and Melton and Simon's Understanding the New SQL: A Complete Guide (Morgan Kaufmann, 1993. It looked as if both vendor- specific information and standards explications were well covered. But talking to new and developing SQL users, we heard over and over of their need for examples to follow, change, narrow, and broaden. Accordingly, the bulk of the added material in the second edition is in two completely new chapters. Both of them are composed largely of code "recipes." Reported errors in the original chapters have also been corrected. Chapter 11, "Solving Business Problems," is a selection of code samples based on questions and answers that came over the popular NETNEWS/USENET computer networks. We reproduced interesting problems and solutions in terms of the sample bookbiz database used throughout the book. The chapter includes examples of formatting results, finding data, working with multitable queries, using the GROUP BY clause, and creating sequential numbers. A few samples fell into a different category. They weren't so much solutions to problems as indications of common errors. These items went into Chapter 12, "Mistakes and How to Avoid Them." They include GROUP BY, HAVING, and WHERE interactions, DISTINCT, and misunderstandings of what SQL can do. THE THIRD EDITION The third edition has a different goal: to bring basic SQL grammar up to date and to incorporate those SQL-92 changes that most vendors have adopted. These include new datatypes, additions to the CREATE TABLE statement that allow built-in integrity constraints, modifications to the ORDER BY and GROUP BY clauses, the new escape character for the LIKE keyword, and changes to GRANT and REVOKE, among others. We looked at the syntax of the most common commands for Sybase SQL Server, Sybase SQL Anywhere, Microsoft SQL Server, Informix, and Oracle. All of the examples were run on both Sybase SQL Server and SQL Anywhere. The third edition of The Practical SQL Handbook is also more than just a book: a CD containing a run-time version of SQL Anywhere with the sample bookbiz database now comes with it. This means you can run the examples (and your variants) on a PC. We've always felt that the secret to learning SQL is practice. Now you can experiment to your heart's content, trying out code samples with data you know and checking the results to see if they are what you expect. When you're stumped by complicated code, break it into small, meaningful pieces and run them separately to make sure you understand what each segment does. Then put them together in increasingly complex combinations - and have fun!

Preface. Introduction. 1.SQL and Relational Database Management. 2. Designing Datases. 3. Creating and Filling a Database. 4. Selecting Data from the Database. 5. Sorting Data and Other Selection Techniques. 6. Grouping Data and Reporting from it. 7. Joining Tables for Comprehensive Data Analysis. 8. Structuring Queries with Subqueries. 9. Creating and Using Views. 10. Security, Transactions, Performance, and Integrity. 11. Solving Business Problems. Appendix A: Syntax Summary for the SQL Used in This Book. Appendix B: Industry SQL Equivalents. Appendix C: Glossary. Appendix D: The 'bookbiz' Sample Database.