SQL Inside Out – Challenging Puzzles and Puzzling Challenges – Seminar 22nd April, Sweden

April is the month of the presentations and seminars for me (May and June too by the way). On Wednesday April 22nd, I will be presenting a seminar in Sweden (in Kista, near Stockolm), titled: SQL Inside Out – Challenging Puzzles and Puzzling Challenges. It is an interesting journey through some of the most important, useful and funful parts of SQL. In 8 sections, we travel through time, spend time on the couch, enjoin ourselves and use procedural SQL after some networking with a super model (Exsqel) and other odd types in weird collections. Many of the puzzles we discuss are based on real world challenges I had to deal with over the past few years. Time and again it proved that Oracle SQL provides so much functionality that through SQL alone some tough nuts could be cracked.

This seminar allows experienced SQL developers to learn about many useful options, features and facilities in Oracle SQL that will take them beyond the queries they are writing today – more powerful, more elegant and more maintainable.

For more information or to register for this seminar, please go to the website of Oracle University. Note that the AMIS Technology School also offers this seminar, both in our premises in Nieuwegein and on your site if so desired (email: technologyschool@amis.nl).

Today, Oracle SQL is much more than just the simple Select-From-Group By-Order By construction it once used to be. This seminar introduces a series of real world challenges and demonstrates how SQL and sometimes its more recent and more advanced extensions can be leveraged to address those challenges. From calculating the group standings for the Champions League and finding the shortest route from A to B, creating a fuzzy search that returns records by relevance and score with regard to search criteria, to creating a personalized television guide, creating charts, emulating a supermarket cash register, creating a test data generator, implementing a highway speed controller and devising a mobile telephone billing application, we take on clear situations and find ways to make SQL do the work.

SQL functions that we will explore include Pivot and Unpivot (10g and 11g), Analytical Functions, Aggregation, Collections, Intervals, Flashback, Single Statement ETL, SQL/XML, Inline Views, Outer Joins, Hierarchical (& Network) Queries, Fine Grained Auditing, Cursor Expressions and the Model Clause. Note however that the functional challenges determine the pace and we visit only SQL functions we can really use.