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.