Learning/Teaching SQL
Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2003 16:42:35 -0500
Message-ID: <3FC129CB.2060604_at_jamtoday.com>
[Quoted] I hope this isnt an off topic subject for an oracle.tools disucssion, but I notice that at last some of the contributors here are educators with strong opinions.
[Quoted] [Quoted] Some (few) of our users has expressed a desire to learn SQL so as to be able to write their own ad hoc queries/reports via sql plus if need be, or through some other front end tool if we can round one up at trivial cost (see threads on this forum)
So, the question I have for our educator friends is:
What topics , in what order and in what depth would you suggest for an end user whose interests are entirely practical.
[Quoted] Is there an commonly available text that stands head and shoulders over all the rest?
Thats sort of the cheater's way out of making a curriculum. Find an excellent presentation and use it. Its what we call "Lobachefskii's" method (google " Tom Leher" if you dont know what I'm babbling on about).
To see where my prejudice lies; if it were PL/SQL rather than SQL I'ld say hands down Feuersteins "Oracle PL/SQL Programming" O'Reilly press is the best butter
They probably dont need to know a whole lot about normalization theory but they sure do have to know about outer joins and about when and why the naivly stated inner join wont give them the correct result.
But heck, you-all are the experts, whats your take on it?
Remember the student's goal is to be able to fish the answers out of the
database in a readable form, starting
with no particular technical background in Oracle or databases, but with
a technical mindset and enough familiarty with the usual mix of
personal computer operations that one finds in a modern office .....Word
processors, spread sheets, email, power point,
etc..Computer phobia and mouse dislexia are not problems here.
Well, that understates their knowlege a tad. They do know about representing data as tables of rows and columns and have some intuition about indexes and most can probably peck out "Select * From sometable Where somecol=constant" Received on Sun Nov 23 2003 - 22:42:35 CET