[bump909]

i'm interested in learning all about SQL except i don't know where to start. i'd like to see if database administration is something i'd be interested in as our company could use a DBA. could anyone with any experience point me in the right direction? books, links, whatever you got.

[ZX-12R]

Originally Posted by bump909

could anyone with any experience point me in the right direction?

You just queried the forum so you've got that concept down!

[97BladeRider]

Good book for basic programming:

Amazon.com: Beginning SQL Server 2005 Programming (Programmer to Programmer): Books: Robert Vieira

And administration:

Amazon.com: Beginning SQL Server 2005 Administration: Books: Dan Wood,Chris Leiter,Paul Turley

[rebelpacket]

Start with MySQL. Its free, commonly used, plenty of examples out there and will give you a good intro to basic SQL.

I would lean tward learning Oracle PL/SQL over MS SQL. Microsoft SQL lands you a small niche, whilst Oracle PL/SQL not only gives you a more-in-demand skill, but a better concept of REAL transactional clustered databases.

[Billy]

I'm a network admin but one of my many responsibilities is SQL administation. I'm by no means an "expert" but I do know quite a lot about the product.

ummmm I don't know any good books as an intro to it. I basically learned it by using it. I do use my "Microsoft's SQL Server 2000 Administrator's Pocket Consultant" book a lot.

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Administrator's Pocket Consultant ISBN: 0-7356-1129-7

[bump909]

right on.. thanks guys.

[DBConz]

I like PL-SQL also. If you have any programming background, I found it easier to learn

[joeswamp]

Originally Posted by rebelpacket

Start with MySQL. Its free, commonly used, plenty of examples out there and will give you a good intro to basic SQL.

I would lean tward learning Oracle PL/SQL over MS SQL. Microsoft SQL lands you a small niche, whilst Oracle PL/SQL not only gives you a more-in-demand skill, but a better concept of REAL transactional clustered databases.

I've noticed that lots of big corporations use Oracle, but isn't MySQL the backbone of Wikipedia? (which has got to be one seriously large database). If MySQL can handle that and it's free, why does anyone pay any money for database software?

The reason I ask this is not to be smart or anything, I'm just totally ignorant on this subject (and I need to start learning about it)...

[rebelpacket]

MySQL isn't "free" anymore. There is still a freely available version which will do lots. You can do all sorts of replication with MySQL. However, it doesn't work as well as oracle for SERIOUSLY large databases. The backup and recovery tools are not as robust as Oracle and other large RDMS's, and high availiblity MySQL clusters are still a bit of a black box.

I'm not saying Oracle is perfect, lord knows we've found more than a hundred bugs. But when you really start to scale databases to the high levels of both capacity and high availiblity, MySQL just doesn't have the ooomph-fsaaah yet.

ESPNNews/Sportcenter data is served off two 32 processor power five systems, with 64GB of ram each, connected to two 36TB disk arrays, and we can and have maxed the crap out of those systems on crazy days. The number of MySQL servers, and the complexity involved in setting up a replicated cluster of that size makes MySQL impractical (for us).

[number9]

bump909: I agree with several others, I think that MySQL is probably your best bet for getting your feet wet. Here is a good tutorial from webmonkey.com about a very simple, web-driven database. You can do pretty advanced stuff with MySQL (like clustering, replication etc.) but as rebelpacket says, Oracle is where the really big boys play (and where the big $ is at). But, the learning curve is very steep.

rebelpacket: Is that who you work for? I am... impressed.

[KB]

Sounds high tech. And I thought trying to understand TCP/IP and Voip technologies was bad.

KB

[TheIglu]

Just run antivirus and Ad-Aware. Should take care of your issue, bump.