What Readers Are Saying About SQL Antipatterns
I am a strong advocate of best practices. I prefer to learn from other
people’s mistakes. This book is a comprehensive collection of those
other people’s mistakes and, quite surprisingly, some of my own. I
wish I had read this book sooner.
Marcus Adams
Senior Software Engineer
Bill has written an engaging, useful, important, and unique book.
Software developers will certainly benefit from reading the anti-
patterns and solutions described here. I immediately applied tech-
niques from this book and improved my applications. Fantastic work!
Frederic Daoud
Author of Stripes: ...And Java Web Development Is Fun Again
and Getting Started with Apache Click
SQL Antipatterns is a must-read for software developers, who will
frequently encounter the database design choices presented in this
book. It helps development teams to understand the consequences of
their database designs and to make the best decisions possible based
on requirements, expectations, measurements, and reality.
Darby Felton
Cofounder, DevBots Software Development
I really like how Bill has approached this book; it shows his unique
style and sense of humor. Those things are really important when
discussing potentially dry topics. Bill has succeeded in making the
teachings accessible for developers in a good descriptive form, as
well as being easy to reference later. In short, this is an excellent new
resource for your pragmatic bookshelf!
Arjen Lentz
Executive Director of Open Query (http://openquery.com);
C
oauthor of High Performance MySQL, Second Edition
This book is obviously the product of many years of practical expe-
rience with SQL databases. Each topic is covered in great depth,
and the attention to detail in the book was beyond my expectations.
Although it’s not a beginner’s book, any developer with a reasonable
amount of SQL experience should find it to be a valuable reference
and would be hard-pressed not to learn something new.
Mike Naberezny
Partner at Maintainable Software; Coauthor of Rails for PHP
Developers
This is an excellent book for the software engineer who knows basic
SQL but finds herself needing to design SQL databases for projects
that go a little beyond the basics.
Liz Neely
Senior Database Programmer
Karwin’s book is full of good and practical advice, and it was pub-
lished at the right time. While many people are focusing on the new
and seemingly fancy stuf f, professionals now have the chance and the
perfect book to sharpen their SQL knowledge.
Maik Schmidt
Author of Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails and
Enterprise Integration with Ruby
Bill has captured the essence of a slew of traps that we’ve probably all
dug for ourselves at one point or another when working with SQL —
without even realizing we’re in trouble. Bill’s antipatterns range from
“I can’t believe I did that (again!)” hindsight gotchas to tricky scenar-
ios where the best solution may run counter to the SQL dogma you
grew up with. A good read for SQL diehards, novices, and everyone in
between.
Danny Thorpe
Microsoft Principal Engineer; Author of Delphi Component
Design
SQL Antipatterns
Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming
Bill Karwin
The Pragmatic Bookshelf
Raleigh, North Carolina Dallas, Texas
