Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)As a professional database consultant and college instructor, I found this textbook to be an academic exercise that is flawed in defining basic concepts and filled with useless details.
While Rob and Coronel are listed as the authors, it's obvious that this was a departmental project at the Middle Tennessee State University, where they teach. The writing style is one of boring exposition perfomed by a team of writers against an arbitrary outline.
It's incredible that a 750-page university text in 4th edition has inaccurate definitions and misleading examples of the basic concepts of the field. They don't event get 1st Normal Form right...as they show data in redundant rows and call that "repeating groups." For Transactions they give the ANSI definitions for COMMIT and ROLLBACK and then claim that they don't need to be used if "the application terminates normally." So, does that mean we should only use transaction processing when we write SQL with the intent to make applications that abend?
The book revels is lots of useless details, providing more quantity that quality. Oddly, while the authors present themselves as Oracle experts, all the data shots (and accompanying databases provided on an instructor's CDROM by publisher Thomson Learning) are rendered in Microsoft Access.
Many of the problems provided at the chapter ends are literally impossible to complete. How can a student normalize a one-row data sample with no business case or rules? How is a student supposed to derive exact Semester beginning and ending points from a list of random dates? Apparently, the editors didn't bother to have anyone attempt solving such problems.
This textbook does not provide adequate training for basic SQL, professional database development, or serious database administration. I was forced to use it for college classes, and I supplemented with more outside material than I could cull from the text. It's not enough to allude to things like triggers and stored procedures--you have to actually write them in the real world.
There are many other database books to choose from for both theory and practice.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Database Systems: Design, Implementation, and Management, Fifth Edition
Database Systems: Design, Implementation, and Management is the only book that takes students step-by-step through the entire process of database development and creation. This text provides the most comprehensive, detailed, and clear coverage of database basics, with ample exercises and problems at the end of each chapter to encourage hands-on learning. After completing this text, students will gain the marketable skills and technical background necessary to compete in tomorrow's competitive database administration marketplace. A new chapter, "Databases and the Internet," provides detailed instruction on using Cold Fusion 4.0 to create online databases.
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