Great Book! I wish I had come across it when I was just starting with SQL, as it is, even though I had little trouble with the "beginner" section it still highlighted alternate approaches to things I do differently and I am learning on the "intermediate" section and looking forward to "advanced". I obtained the Pro package from the book website to get additional problems (and got a discount from the author by providing the amazon purchase details). I highly recommend to anyone dealing with SQL, especially those that have not had day-to-day immersion in it.

This is an outstanding book for anyone that wants to get up to speed with real world MS-SQL development - and in a hurry. I am a .Net veteran that has used MS SQL server with C# in almost every project I have done but for various reasons including the strength of my C# skills never really took the time to properly utilize SQL and process data using SQL.

The book provides a sample database and presents real-world problems and solutions starting from "Beginning" to "Intermediate" and finally to "Advanced" in terms of difficulty. It showcases ever more difficult SQL problems requiring ever increasing SQL knowledge to solve. Correct result sets are included with the problem definitions. You are encouraged to solve the problem yourself but if stuck the answer is available along with accurate and succint explanation. By the end of the book, you are armed with the knowldge necessary to tackle any real-world problem or respond correctly to any SQL related "Technical interview" challenge.

I've been a DBA for over 15 years and have written a lot of T-SQL code, but this book was a great refresher and introduced some new practices, query ideas I had never thought about before. This is a great book for sharpening your T-SQL querying skills and helping you to gauge your skills -- useful for interview prep and other. I think this book would be useful for both beginners and advanced users.

I love this book! Really great practice.

I really enjoyed this. I did almost all the problems in a couple days and it was great to just practice things that don’t come up in my job. It gets you going right away and having the live database with it made it feel very practical.

Worked with SQL years ago, but have gotten beyond rusty. Looking at possible job interview that requires some SQL, using this book along with the fifth edition of Sam's Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes to refresh my memories.

Both books would also be good for beginners. I pretty much taught myself SQL using the printed 2nd Edition of Teach Yourself SQL in 10 minutes and the internet. I bought the kindle versions of both books because its much easier to study and solve practice problems when you can have the book up on one screen and the interface to a RDBMS to work the problems on another.

I just finished all 57 problems in this book in my spare time over the past week. I cannot say enough about how much I enjoyed learning from this book. If you are like me and find that you grasp concepts easier by using the hands-on, learn-by-doing techniques, then this book is for you. I love how the author gives real world scenario problems, and just enough information to figure out the solution, or at least enough information to do some research to solve the problem. I find this approach extremely effective. I already purchased the next book, More SQL Practice Problems, and feel guilty for using the 50% discount code provided at the end of this book because even at full price the book is well worth the money.

This is okay. For a few dollars more you can get the very thorough and comprehensive SQL Cookbook by Anthony Molinaro, which also covers advanced Select statements, but then a whole lot more.

The explanations there are considerably more detailed as well, and cover PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MSSQL.

The author is an Österreicher. For her betrayal, I deduct one star.

I've never used SQL before, other than Proc SQL in SAS while at graduate school. When buying this book, I thought it would teach me sophisticated skills as those that help me solve SQL problems in some SQL challenge websites. Sadly, this book is too basic and the title is extremely confusing. The title should have been "SQL Practice for Kids and Toddlers" rather than adults wishing to learn SQL for real-world jobs. There is no question in the book that is similar to what I've been doing using SAS (handling a dataset of 500 million rows and performing complex queries, merges, filterings, etc.).

I really enjoyed your book. I spended a wonderful weekend solving all the practice problems on my computer. I have to say that even though the firsts problems are easy to solve, this sense of overconfidence fades away and rather quickly, right at the JOIN practice problems before the intermediate problems section.

I found myself before problems where I did not have an immediate answer. I got to actually think really hard to solve the problems, specially the ones at the advanced problems section.

I learned about the existence of CTE’s (common table expressions) and they are really useful. As well as the use of several date time functions that I rarely use, but those are really useful too.

I recommend this book as a training exercise to all those database administrators that seek a challenge to their skills.

I actually recorded the entire time I was solving the problems and you may find the YouTube playlist on the link below.

Hello Ms Sylvia Moestl Vasilik,

First of all, I want to tell you that your book is awesome!

I was able to solve all the exercises from basic package to professional package.

I am confident now that I have reached a significant level of proficiency in SQL coding as these exercises are far more complicated that the ones I encountered from my previous experience.

I am glad that I bought this book.

With regards to exercise #39 of professional package, I could not understand why MIN() function was used in the problem (out of curiosity, I tried to replace MIN() with MAX() and it gave me the same answer).

Anyway, without peeking at the answer, my solution below resulted to same result:

;WITH Main AS

(

SELECT

Customer.CustomerID,

CustomerName = FirstName + ' ' + LastName,

LineTotal = SUM(LineTotal),

ProductSubCategoryName,

RowNumber =

ROW_NUMBER()

OVER

(

PARTITION BY

Customer.CustomerID

ORDER BY

SUM(LineTotal) DESC

)

FROM

Customer

LEFT JOIN

SalesOrderheader

ON

Customer.CustomerID = SalesOrderheader.CustomerID

JOIN

SalesOrderDetail

ON

SalesOrderHeader.SalesOrderID =SalesOrderDetail.SalesOrderID

JOIN

Product

ON

SalesOrderDetail.ProductID = Product.ProductID

JOIN

ProductSubcategory

ON

Product.ProductSubcategoryID = ProductSubcategory.ProductSubcategoryID

WHERE

Customer.CustomerID

IN

(

13763,

13836,

20331,

21113,

26313

)

GROUP BY

Customer.CustomerID,

FirstName + ' ' + LastName,

ProductSubCategoryName

)

SELECT

ProductSubCat1.CustomerID,

ProductSubCat1.CustomerName,

TopProductSubCat1 = ProductSubCat1.ProductSubCategoryName,

TopProductSubCat2 = ProductSubCat2.ProductSubCategoryName,

TopProductSubCat3 = ProductSubCat3.ProductSubCategoryName

FROM

(

SELECT

*

FROM

Main

WHERE

RowNumber = 1

) ProductSubCat1

LEFT JOIN

(

SELECT

*

FROM

Main

WHERE

RowNumber = 2

) ProductSubCat2

ON

ProductSubCat1.CustomerID = ProductSubCat2.CustomerID

LEFT JOIN

(

SELECT

*

FROM

Main

WHERE

RowNumber = 3

) ProductSubCat3

ON

ProductSubCat1.CustomerID = ProductSubCat3.CustomerID

My code does not use MIN().

Also there is no need for me to use GROUP BY and ORDER BY at end of the code.

I want to know if my solution is correct or has merits. Please let me know.

Thank you and again more power!

Juan Sena

The book provides practical questions

So by solvythe problems you will gain very good understanding of the concepts

Il libro non contiene molti problemi realmente "advanced".

Molti problemi sono varianti dello stesso problema quindi in realtà i problemi non sono 57.

Inoltre nella sezione "Discussion" non ci sono molti elementi utili ma in molti casi inviti ad effettuare ricerche online sui vari argomenti.

In definitiva sconsiglio l'acquisto del libro.