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For this review to make sense, you must keep in mind that I am referring to the 11th edition and that I used the book with MySQL. I chose the book for my course because my colleague had had good experiences with a number of the earlier editions using Oracle. I was excited that the 11th edition included MySQL as I was strongly leaning in that direction and having a quality textbook that support MySQL let me go ahead with this choice. My experiences, however, have not been favorable.
There is a lot of very good material in the book. Probably 80% of the material, battle tested in earlier editions is first rate. Another 10% involves issues that, while I am not happy with them, I will confess are a matter of taste. For example, I find the sections on dbaccess to be pointless. The problem is that the last 10% of the material, those that focus on MySQL, are a disaster.
Let me start with problems that will affect all readers. The book is badly proofread. This leads to a series of problems, such as mis-labeled diagrams, mis-numbered problems, duplicate problems, etc. These may seem minor, although given the price of the book one might think that Prentice Hall could hire someone to proof read it; however, they create many problems. For example, the review questions for chapter 2 use three printed data tables that are entered to allow the problems to be worked. Both Figure 2-22 and Figure 2-24 are labeled "WAREHOUSE Data", but have completely different data. The reader must puzzle out which of the two is in fact warehouse data and what table the other figure represents.
The instructors powerpoint slides have some typos as well. Particularly unhelpful is are bugs in SQL on slides
My biggest problems have to do with material specific to MySQL. Some are errors of omission. The text in chapter 2 discusses using the + sign for string concatenation; however, this is not supported by MySQL, which uses a function called concat. The text claims to call out differences between products, but makes no mention of this. It's a problem easily caught by having a proof reader try all the examples in each "supported" product. Another omission is that supporting code that is supplied for other products is missing for MySQL. For one of the chapter 2 examples, the SQLServer code provides insert statements for three tables of example data where the MySQL code only provides inserts for one of the tables. It took me considerable (unplanned) time to edit the SQLServer code to the point it would work on MySQL.
These problems pale in comparison to MySQL specific chapter 10B. Many of the code examples presented in 10B simply don't work in MySQL. Conveniently, this is an on-line chapter that is not actually printed in the book. This makes it easy to cut and paste the code examples into MySQL, something no one involved in the books production bothered doing.
What all this means is that an instructor planning on using this book needs to set aside enough time in his/her prep schedule to try ever snippet of code in the book, fix the problems, and prepare a workaround for their class. Some of these problems are covered in the errata for the book, currently 20 pages long, but none of the code problems in 10B are covered (some of the text problems from 10B are).
I contacted my helpful Prentice Hall sales rep about these issues, who expressed sympathy and assured me that I would be contacted by PH tech support for assistance, which never happened.
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Get readers straight to the point of database processing. Database Processing reflects a new teaching method that gets readers straight to the point with its thorough and modern presentation of database processing fundamentals. The eleventh edition includes active use of DBMS products, a new focus on database application processing, and coverage of Business Intelligence systems.
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