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Refactoring SQL Applications

By Stephane Faroult, Pascal L'Hermite

(4)

| Paperback | 9780596514976

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2 Reviews

"Refactoring"?

This book is a sort of "companion" to The Art of SQL (same author).
While I appreciate the style and find it pretty useful, I am a bit disappointed for the choice of title (hence the 4 stars).
"Refactoring" is usually succinctly described as "improving quality without changing the behaviour of a gi ... (continue)

This book is a sort of "companion" to The Art of SQL (same author).
While I appreciate the style and find it pretty useful, I am a bit disappointed for the choice of title (hence the 4 stars).
"Refactoring" is usually succinctly described as "improving quality without changing the behaviour of a given piece of code" - and in this sense the title is more or less adequate. The problem is that the only concept of "quality" in this case regards query efficiency.
I suppose this is more or less what a DBA or SQL expert really cares about, but if you expected patterns (and anti-patterns), the concept of code smells or - maybe more appropriately - how to incrementally redesign your tables to make them "better"... well, this book is not for you.
In fact you are probably looking for "Agile Database Techniques" or some other title. This one is 99% about query rewriting and maybe 1% of other techniques like change indexes or even restructure tables. But always and only in order to improve throughput.
If this is the type of "quality" you are concerned about, I doubt you can find something better. For a more balanced concept of "Refactoring" you should probably check some other book.

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Pamar said on Apr 1, 2011 | Add your feedback

Adding yet another index is seldom the right thing to do!

A good book on SQL performance, by the same author of The Art Of SQL (which I also recommend).
The examples are with MySQL, SQL Server and Oracle, and it's quite obvious from them that the optimizer of the former is more limited than the others. Postgres would be in the same league of SQL Serve ... (continue)

A good book on SQL performance, by the same author of The Art Of SQL (which I also recommend).
The examples are with MySQL, SQL Server and Oracle, and it's quite obvious from them that the optimizer of the former is more limited than the others. Postgres would be in the same league of SQL Server and Oracle when it comes to optimizing - and a lot of the other features - so Postgres uses benefit from this read as well.
What the book is about:
- finding and eliminating bottlenecks, either in SQL, procedural code, or the application itself
- rewriting queries to make a better use of the optimizer
- profiling
- analyzing execution plans
- avoiding procedural code when possible, or employing it when it makes more sense
- testing and verifying data contents of even huge tables
- avoiding too many trips and loops between the application and the DBMS
- trade-offs between simplicity and performance
What the book is _not_ about:
- theory
- schema design and normalization
- MySQL criticism
- performance tuning via configuration parameters or optimizer directives (they are considered as a last resort)
- quick recipes that solve everything without using brainpower (no free meals!)
Some of the best practices Stephan writes about are common sense to a practitioner with some experience, but it feels warm to read them from an author who used to work for Oracle back in '83.

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Marco Mariani said on May 23, 2009 | Add your feedback