calling all geeks...

RicheyJames · 23 Nov 2005, 16:58

i'm currently seeking new employment opportunities and one or two of the roles i've recently applied for require a degree of sql-type knowledge. whilst I'm fairly comfortable with the general concepts I'm somewhat less comfortable with the actual application of those principles. anyone care to point me in the direction of books, websites, etc that might be valuable in giving myself a crash course?

aims · 23 Nov 2005, 17:15

Which dialect of SQL are they asking for? The MySQL docs are a decent general reference, but you should avoid anything that's specific to a SQL dialect which you're not going to be using. If you know which server they're running, then the vendor's online docs should be good enough for a crash course.

23 Nov 2005, 17:43

indeed.

along with skimming through the docs, the best thing to do is download a copy of mysql server (v4 to start with), install it and have a play with either the built-in command line client or one of the gui clients available on the site for download ("mysql administrator"?)

and if you need a sample db to start playing with i can provide you with one...

hallucienate · 23 Nov 2005, 18:05

MySQL is quiet lightweight, but a good start, the basics are all pretty much the same. Any serious business application will run something a bit more beefy.

I found http://grub.ath.cx/mysql/ quite a useful reference for MySQL.

23 Nov 2005, 18:09

hallucienate wrote:MySQL is quiet lightweight, but a good start, the basics are all pretty much the same. Any serious business application will run something a bit more beefy.

indeed. oracle and sybase are the two most popular ones, but you might also find db2...

and you can rest easy, you're unlikely to find microsoft sql server running in any top-end system

(note: mysql should not be confused with ms sql server

)

aims · 23 Nov 2005, 18:10

Just for reference here are a few free implementations that you can read around or play with to get a feel for common SQL syntax and the major differences:

http://www.postgres.org/
http://firebird.sourceforge.net/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/expre ... fault.aspx
http://www.sqlite.org/

Postgres and MSSQL are probably the most useful, since they're more likely to come up in stand alone commercial development (bigger developments than MySQL, not biggest as Quiffy noted above)while SQLite is for embedding, generally.

hallucienate · 23 Nov 2005, 18:14

We're using Postgres at work to do all our ADSL authentication, logging, capping, quotas, etc. You can run some pretty impressive queries on it too. It'll probably be avoided by big business as it's open source

RicheyJames · 23 Nov 2005, 18:19

thanks guys!

to be honest, as an 'umble management information analyst, i'm only really interested in querying these buggers and getting the right results out. janet and john stuff to you guys i'm sure but still very much a matter of trial and error for little old me.

good to hear mention of sybase quiffy since that's how we currently extract information from our telecoms systems. at least i know i'm on the right lines!

aims · 23 Nov 2005, 18:20

hallucienate wrote:We're using Postgres at work to do all our ADSL authentication, logging, capping, quotas, etc. You can run some pretty impressive queries on it too. It'll probably be avoided by big business as it's open source

Boo, hiss, etc

That attitude does kind of annoy me, since big business has been using Apache, *BSD, BIND, sendmail, etc, for core infrastructure for a very long time. Most stuff from research labs and Unis around the start of the internet (a lot of which is still used today) was developed under a FOSS license. It's only now that Open Source has become a buzz word that they're having to take baby-steps into it...while conveniently forgetting that what they're already running is OS

hallucienate · 23 Nov 2005, 18:26

Motz wrote:
hallucienate wrote:We're using Postgres at work to do all our ADSL authentication, logging, capping, quotas, etc. You can run some pretty impressive queries on it too. It'll probably be avoided by big business as it's open source
Boo, hiss, etc

That attitude does kind of annoy me, since big business has been using Apache, *BSD, BIND, sendmail, etc, for core infrastructure for a very long time. Most stuff from research labs and Unis around the start of the internet (a lot of which is still used today) was developed under a FOSS license. It's only now that Open Source has become a buzz word that they're having to take baby-steps into it...while conveniently forgetting that what they're already running is OS

I know exactly what you're saying. OS pays my wages, but the "Absolutely No Warranty" part scares off people who want to scream, shout and sue when things go wrong.

Please don't mention bind around me, I get a nervous twitch.

James Blast · 23 Nov 2005, 20:39

Well, well, bloody hell. Who'd have thought Richey to have aspirations of geekness?

26 Nov 2005, 11:01

hallucienate wrote:
Motz wrote:
hallucienate wrote:We're using Postgres at work to do all our ADSL authentication, logging, capping, quotas, etc. You can run some pretty impressive queries on it too. It'll probably be avoided by big business as it's open source
Boo, hiss, etc

That attitude does kind of annoy me, since big business has been using Apache, *BSD, BIND, sendmail, etc, for core infrastructure for a very long time. Most stuff from research labs and Unis around the start of the internet (a lot of which is still used today) was developed under a FOSS license. It's only now that Open Source has become a buzz word that they're having to take baby-steps into it...while conveniently forgetting that what they're already running is OS
I know exactly what you're saying. OS pays my wages, but the "Absolutely No Warranty" part scares off people who want to scream, shout and sue when things go wrong.

Please don't mention bind around me, I get a nervous twitch.

yep.

and a lot of that attitude within big business is purely down to the financiers in "the city".

a competitor of ours, betfair, recently tried to float on the stock exchange but had to pull out at the last minute because most of the systems ran on open-source software

the potential investors lost confidence...

rightly or wrongly, when you pay for software there is a perceived accountability for it.

what happens if your linux/postgres/jboss-based system goes down? who do you ring? no one. your support technician spends 2 hours faffing with the configs, and then trawls the news groups at 4am for an answer... if you have purchased your kits from sun, bea, or whoever you will likely have an "SLA" (service level agreement), whereby they promise to have provide a level of service & assistance that means your revenue-generating business should be back online as soon as possible.

for example, when we buy a copy of weblogic from bea for x thousands of pounds per cpu license, its not the cd in the box we pay for but the bea support. they provide 1-on-1 points of contacts, 24/7 bug resolution, on- and off-site consultancy, and lots of other stuff.

management and investors see this is a much less of a risk to the business.

sad but true

aims · 26 Nov 2005, 12:08

Quiff Boy wrote:rightly or wrongly, when you pay for software there is a perceived accountability for it.

See, this is what particularly irks me, since proprietary EULAs bend over backwards to avoid accountability for anything. Outside of whichever service contract you've got (which I can see the value of, but working for a 3rd party doesn't make you superhuman, so I guess a sehr experienced admin might pull it off sans external support), there's nowt different. Of course this is coming from a hobbyist who's experience in vendor liability pretty much amounts to grepping EULAs for the word "death" and reading too much of Slashdot's "Your Rights Online" Section

26 Nov 2005, 12:16

"proprietary EULAs bend over backwards to avoid accountability for anything"

very true

yep, imho you're points are pretty much correct. but try explaining that to a bunch of bean counters