Optimizing Transact-SQL: Advanced Programming Techniques

Read all the reviews. I've read all of the public articles that Rozenshtein wrote. Those of you who read the book and did not value the content, I wonder about you. "Impossible" "Skip this one" "Esoterica" Did you miss the most important point of the book? Think differently and you just might find a simple elegant solution to your data access problem.I can hear the groanings now, "cross table joins, elegant"? What you do not know is that when Rozenshtein proposed the solutions you read about, the companies he worked with set down expectations under which Rozenshtein worked. He was to find a one-pass method of solving the data access problems of a company who had poorly designed very large databases and a limited time to assemble the data needed for daily reporting. Rozenshtein only had enough time to make one-pass through all the databases at once to collect the data for these daily reports.What you read in this book is about brilliant problem solving that produces results businesses value. Rozenshtein is a mathmatician sought out by large companies to solve data access problems that their staff could not solve. This book is about data access problem solving to produce results. I believe most everyone could stand to improve their results.

You don't have to read the whole book, just first three chapters of this book will more than pay for itself. It seems complicated in the beginning with new notations, and their notations hide the simplicity and elegance of characteristic functions. However, once you get the concept of characteristic functions, it can help you enormously. I can't say enough about how good this is, it is such a simple and elegant idea for set-based db-engine, wonder why nobody else had thought of it sooner. I find myself deriving different characteristic functions for all kinds of tasks, and that in it of itself is fun. A must read for anybody using set-based db-engine such as Sybase and MS-SQL server ( despite their claims to the contrary for their latest versions ). Not much help in using this concept in ORACLE, since ORACLE seems to create implicit cursors anyway. I have improved speed in stored procedures by more than ten-fold by using the characteristic functions. Hooorrray!!!!!!!!!!

Cut my mining queries down by minutes with the simplest of statements

This book provides the definitive approach for the cross-tabulation/row positioning problem. The techniques presented in this book will stimulate new and innovative approaches to improve performance. This is not a How-To Cookbook. Every time I re-read this book, I find ideas and inspiration to help me solve today's programming challenge. If you develop stored procedures, you must have this book.

Best of its kind. Understanding charecteristic functions made easy.