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The Oracle SQL Certified Expert exam covers several topics that are not covered in books that are geared towards the SQL Fundamentals exam. It is for that reason that I purchased this book to use as a study guide for the Oracle SQL Certified Expert exam. I recently passed the exam and give full credit to the time I spent going through this book and taking the practice tests.
The books assumes a little knowledge of SQL but I think it is a great guide for both beginners, and experts alike. It is well organized and has a great index. You can read it from beginning to end and it makes logical sense, or you can simply use it as a reference to look up the portions you are interested in. Because the book is geared towards passing the exam and not simply to provide more general SQL knowledge, you won't find any examples that you work on, alongside the book, as you read. Some people might find it hard to learn that way, but for me it was great. I didn't need to have a computer in front of me to try out the code to understand what it meant. This also allowed the book to focus on some of the more subtle and conceptual aspects of the SQL language and how Oracle has implemented it. I think that is key to having passed the exam. Because the book teaches the concepts behind the SQL language, instead of just giving syntax examples, it helps you correctly answer questions that might not directly relate to examples given in the book. For example, the book has a great section on the meaning of "NULL" which is used in a lot of "trick" questions.Read more ›
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Steve O'Hearn does a good job delivering a very encouraging, personal (as well as informative) tone to the material. While containing much the same material as other Oracle Press SQL books, it does not lift or "steal" any of the wording. O'Hearn has opted to write everything from scratch. The book also lacks the typographical errors that have plagued so many Oracle Press books over the years. This book's objective is to prepare you for the exam. It is not an exhaustive SQL reference (though certainly robust) - nor does it claim to be. In addition to the book itself, you also have access to the ebook and additional exam simulated questions via the CD. The ebook is in Adobe and isn't formatted quite as well as the Kindle version. The ebook is baked into the price at nearly $40. There really isn't too much I would offer in the area of improvements - except to have even more exam type questions.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
I have used multiple books to prepare for the Oracle SQL Expert exam. This particular book is unique in that it covers all the topics for the exam (including the following topics which are hard to find in just one book): Generating Reports by Grouping Related Data, Managing Objects with Data Dictionary Views, Regular Expression Support, and Hierarchical Retrieval, and a few sections on managing TimeZones, Flashback, and External Tables.
Although this book is comprehensive enough for the examination, I thought the topics were covered more clearly in other books - particularly Oracle SQL by Watson and Mastering oracle SQL by Mishra. If your primary goal is to pass the exam, this book is ideal. Otherwise, study from a combination of aforementioned books.
Pros: +Covers all the topics for the SQL Expert certification. +Accessible to someone new to Oracle.
Cons: -The author repeats himself 3 to 4 times in each section. -The syntax and the description are verbose ( the syntax is given with an example query and about a page describing it which could have easily been replaced by [ ] | etc...) -The examples are rudimentary and extremely obvious from the discussion
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As someone who has been working with Oracle for years, I was pretty confident about my SQL knowledge but I decided to buy this book anyway in order to fill some small gaps that I noticed when I checked the topics covered in the exam. I am glad that I did, because the gaps were a little bit bigger than I thought and some of the topics I was feeling very confident about needed some polishing.
As I am used to working with strict naming conventions, a basic question such as whether or not is possible to give the very same name to a table, an index or a constraint never occurred to me before (the answer is yes, as they belong to different namespaces). I also thought that I knew perfectly well everything related to joins but I found little surprises such as a predefined keyword for the Cartesian product (CROSS JOIN) or that a column of datatype TIMESTAMP WITH LOCAL TIME ZONE can be used as a PK but a column of datatype TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE cannot.
The book is well organized and it covers point by point the objectives of the Oracle exam. The examples are well chosen (no need to be in front of your computer) and the way the author explains each topic is so clear that the book could also be used by a beginner as a learning tool. I could only spot a small typo (SEELCT instead of SELECT on page 521) and probably one of the questions on a self test about the use of a pseudocolumn on page 163 that could have been improved a little bit:
SELECT ROWNUM, * FROM PORTS ORDER BY PORT_NAME;
It fails with a syntax error but the author didn't mention that it can be solved by using an alias:
SELECT ROWNUM, p.* FROM PORTS p ORDER BY PORT_NAME;
But these are really unimportant details.Read more ›
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