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Disclaimer: I am only in the second chapter of this book. I've come across several minor inaccuracies, typos and points of confusion that I wanted to highlight. It's too early for me to give the book a full critical review.
The first chapter attempts to give a brief introduction to relational database systems. This chapter, diagrams and charts included, is only about ten pages long, followed by a two-page group of exercises. The covered points in this short chapter seem somewhat random and unrelated. They are valid points of discussion, but overall this chapter seems relatively unhelpful. It is my opinion that some of the topics that are touched on, such as Normal Forms and the Entity-Relationship Model, should either be explained in more detail or removed from the introductory chapter and given full chapters on their own.
The idea of a table having a primary key is briefly touched on, and then referenced many times over the next few pages, but there is no concise definition given of what the role of a primary key actually is. The idea that a primary key can be a single column or a combination of columns is mentioned, though without a good explanation of what a primary key actually is, I feel it only adds confusion.
There is a very brief (about one page) section on the Entity-Relationship Model. In the example given, the relationships of 1:1, 1:N and M:N are called out, with no explanation as to what M and N represent. These letters are then shown on an example Entity-Relationship diagram, but without any context, they only make the diagram more confusing.
Minor Errors:
On page 13, in the section covering the syntax conventions of the book, the table containing Convention and Indication contains a few mistakes. The convention for "lowercase" is written "Lowercase" (with an uppercase L) but in the corresponding Indication column of the table, it is used seemingly correctly.
Also in this same table, the convention for default text is called out as "Default", but indicated as follows: "The default value is always underlined. Example: ALL | DISTINCT." Neither of these contain underlining, making me wonder if default text throughout the rest of the book will actually be underlined or not.
Finally, on page 23, when listing out the hardware and software requirements, the text says that the minimum RAM required is 1MB, with the Express Edition only requiring 512KB. I thought that these had to be off by an order of magnitude, so I checked Microsoft's documentation. The correct requirements are a minimum of 1GB, or 512MB for the Express Edition.
I'm hopeful that the text improves as I continue to read it. I originally purchased the 2016 edition of this book in late December, only to find out that the 2019 edition was about to be released. I returned the 2016 edition and ordered this instead, wanting to make sure I had the most up to date information. At this point, it feels as though this edition was somewhat rushed to release.
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- Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2021Format: eTextbook
