Mastering Oracle PL/SQL: Practical Solutions review

Verdict:

Review Date: 18 May 2004

Price when reviewed: ISBN 1590592174

Reviewed By: Kay Ewbank

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

According to the blurb on the cover, if you need more from a PL/SQL book than just the correct keywords and some pretty syntax diagrams, this is the book for you.

It also promises real-world examples and "genuine strategies for maximizing the benefits of PL/SQL". Happily, it lives up to its promise.

Author Connor McDonald is a well-known speaker at Oracle events, and his book is easy to read. He starts off with a guide to writing efficient PL/SQL, then spends a chapter evangelising the use of packages. PL/SQL doesn't have subroutines, but it does use packages. These are generally used to group PL/SQL components together but McDonald advocates using them in a more sophisticated way. I'm not sure I agree with all his suggestions but it's worth reading them to see which you might find useful.

The heart of the book covers key topics such as cursors, triggers and optimisation. There are chapters on security and web packages, effective data handling and DBA packages.

Reading the book you get the impression that this bloke really knows his stuff. He has put in the hours working out how to optimise code or manage cursors, and his style doesn't pull punches. The text is densely packed with information, and there's a lot of PL/SQL - hardly a page without at least a couple of lines of code, and many of the pages are mainly code.

This might not be the ideal book to start with if you're learning PL/SQL, but it's a great read if you already know the basics and want to go that bit further.

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