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Applied Mathematics for Database Professionals (Expert's Voice)
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by Lex de Haan and Toon Koppelaars
Sales Rank: 40869
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Discount: 15 %
List Price: $49.99
$39.99
At Amazon
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Hardcover: 376 pages
Publisher: Apress June 21, 2007
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1590597451
ISBN-13: 978-1590597453
Product Dimensions:
9.2 x 7 x 1.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
Book Description
Relational databases hold data, right? They indeed do, but to think of a database as nothing more than a container for data is to miss out on the profound power that underlies relational technology. A far more powerful way of thinking lies in relational technology's foundation in the mathematical disciplines of logic and set theory.
Databases contain truths or propositions describing some area of interest such as a business. Those truths are organized into sets. Operations from logic and set theory can be applied to existing sets of truths to derive new sets of truths. Applied Mathematics for Database Professionals introduces you to this way of thinking, to the logic and set theory that underlies relational database technology. All this may sound abstract now, but there are profound benefits from the deeper understanding you'll gain from this book. You'll learn to - Become a better database designer. You'll make fewer mistakes, and your designs will be more flexible in response to changing data needs.
- Use the expressive power of mathematics to precisely specify designs and business rules.
- Communicate effectively about design using the universal language of mathematics.
- Develop and write complex SQL statements with confidence.
- Avoid pitfalls and problems from common relational bugaboos such as null values and duplicate rows.
The math that you learn in this book will put you above the level of understanding of most database professionals today. You'll better understand the technology and be able to apply it more effectively. You'll avoid data anomalies like redundancy and inconsistency. Understanding what's in this book will take your mastery of relational technology to heights you may not have thought possible.
This book is reviewed and endorsed by C. J. Date and features a foreword by the same.
About The Author
Lex de Haan studied applied mathematics at the University of Technology in Delft, the Netherlands. His experience with Oracle goes back to the mid-1980s, version 4. He worked for Oracle Corporation from 1990 to 2004 in various education-related roles, ending up in Server Technologies (product development) as senior curriculum manager for the advanced DBA curriculum. In that role, he was involved in the development of Oracle9i and Oracle Database 10g. In March 2004, he decided to go independent and founded Natural Join B.V. (http://www.naturaljoin.nl). From 1999 until his passing in 2006, he was involved in the ISO SQL language standardization process, as a member of the Dutch national body. He was also one of the founding members of the OakTable network (http://www.oaktable.net). Toon Koppelaars studied computer science at the University of Technology in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. He is a long-time Oracle technology user, having used the Oracle database and tools software since 1987, version 4. During his career he has been involved in both application development (terminal/host in the early days, GUI client/server later on, and J2EE nowadays), as well as database administration. Within the data modeling area, the formal specification and robust implementation of data integrity rules (a.k.a. business rules) is one of his special interest areas. He is currently employed as an IT architect at Centraal Boekhuis B.V., a well-known Oracle shop in the Netherlands. As such, he is responsible for technical application architectures with special focus on areas such as scalability, performance, and maintainability of application code. He is also a frequent presenter at Oracle-related conferences. Recently he has won both the Editor�s Choice Award and the Best Speaker Award of the ODTUG-Now! conference.
Customer Reviews & Comments
Writing a book is no easy task. Completing a book when your co-author and friend passes away early in the process, must be a monumental task, this is what Toon Koppelaars achieved with this work. I ordered this book expecting it to contain examples of using statistics, probability and data mining algorithms as applied to databases. In retrospect, I am not sure why I made that assumption. It is actually about formally specifying database designs using logic and set theory. This book is reviewed and endorsed by C. J. Date and features a foreword by him, which would be high praise for any book on the subject of databases. It is split into 3 parts and 12 chapters as follows: 1. Logic: Introduction 2. Set Theory: Introduction 3. Some More Logic 4. Relations and Functions 5. Tables and Database States 6. Tuple, Table, and Database Predicates 7. Specifying Database Designs 8. Specifying State Transition Constraints 9. Data Retrieval 10. Data Manipulation 11. Implementing Database Designs in Oracle 12. Summary and Conclusions If you've studied mathematics (or a tertiary subject with a mathematics element to it) you will most probably be familiar with the sections on set theory and logic. If you have not then they provide an as excellent introduction to these topics that you are likely to find anywhere. This book makes the following claims and I have made my comments against each one: "This book will help you": * "Become a better database designer. You'll make fewer mistakes, and your designs will be more flexible in response to changing data needs." I agree 100% that having a good, if not intuitive, grasp of logic and basic set theory will help you to create better DB schemas. * "Use the expressive power of mathematics to precisely specify designs and business rules." I am not sure how useful this is, and I have a mathematics background. I personally feel that having another notation to express the database design seems to break the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle. * "Communicate effectively about design using the universal language of mathematics." Personally, I do not think this applies unless you are at the top of your game and/or have a theoretical bias and you are communicating with someone similar. * "Develop and write complex SQL statements with confidence." Absolutely agree. I am often surprised at the number of software developers that do not have a thorough grasp of logic. * "Avoid pitfalls and problems from common relational bugaboos such as null values and duplicate rows". Probably, but then 3NF will go a long way to achieving that. I would be the first to agree that a good, basic mathematics grounding is desirable if you want to confidently design databases that scale well and are modelled correctly. The mathematics that you learn in this book will certainly put you above the level of understanding of most database professionals. But I am not convinced that alone will enable you to better understand the technology and be able to apply it more effectively. It will help you to avoid data anomalies like redundancy and inconsistency, which are not uncommon problems in the world of databases! On the whole, I enjoyed reading this book, but I'm not sure if I learnt anything I could immediately put to use when designing and refactoring databases. I did not put a great deal of effort into learning and understanding the formal database specification language described in this book purely because I could not see an immediate benefit when balanced against the effort required to learn a new notation, and I may well have overlooked something crucial that would indeed enable me to create better database designs. http://mitch-wheat.blogspot.com Disclosure: The Perth .NET User Group is a member of the Apress User Group Program. Apress make copies of their books available for user group libraries, and the copy reviewed here was kindly donated by them.
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Applied Mathematics for Database Professionals (Expert's Voice)
List Price: $49.99
Discount: 15 %
Available from Amazon
Price: $39.99
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