Monday, December 7, 2009

C. J. Date: All Systems Go

Enrollment is open for the course taught by Christopher J. Date that we'll host 26–28 January in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. For many of us, this will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to sit in a classroom for three days with one of the pioneers who created the field we live in each day.

I'm looking forward to this course myself. It is so easy to use Oracle in non-relational ways. But not understanding how to use SQL relationally leads to countless troubles and unnecessary complexities. Chris's focus in this course will be the discipline to use Oracle in a truly relational way, the mastery of which will make your applications faster, easier to prove, and more fun to write, maintain, and ehnance.

I'm particularly looking forward to his section about missing values—the ages-old debate about NULL—which is not covered in Chris's book upon which the course is based.
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3 comments:

  1. Gints PlivnaDecember 8, 2009 at 4:32 AM

    I'd probably add two links discussing NULLS for people who will be able to attend this course (unfortunately I'm on the other side of the Globe)
    Much ado about nothing
    debate between E. F. Codd and C. J. Date
    and another blog post by Hugo Kornelis, which finds a possible problem in their discussion.

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  2. UnknownDecember 8, 2009 at 2:22 PM

    I never saw that debate. Very interesting indeed. This reminds me of "Mr NULL" Lex de Haan and his chapter on NULLs (the lost chapter) on "Applied mathematics for database professionals". If I could I would gladly attend this event. Thanks for posting.

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  3. Marco GralikeDecember 8, 2009 at 3:26 PM

    When Lex organized a 2 day seminar in Utrecht with Mr Date (2004); Mr Date had to skip the nullology part due to the fact that it actually had been a 3 day course, and we had to comprise it in 2 (and I regret it until this day...)

    You lucky people ;-)

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