Kerry Osborne's Oracle Blog

Chris Date is one of the founding fathers of relational databases. Having worked with Ted Codd at IBM during the time when relational databases were being defined gives Chris a perspective that most of us just don’t have. I’ve had the good fortune to hear him speak in the past (at the Hotsos Symposium) and thought I would do a quick post to highlight the fact that he is scheduled to speak in Dallas the week of Jan 30. Method-R is hosting the event in the Enkitec training facilities in Dallas. So maybe I’ll get to hang around with Chris and Cary that week – that would be cool! Anyway, there are actually 2 classes:

SQL and Relational Theory: How to Write Accurate SQL Code
Normal Forms and All That Jazz: a Database Professional’s Guide to Database Design Theory

And here’s a link to the registration page:   C. J. Date Seminar Registration

By the way, I think every developer and every database architect should have a clear understanding of how the SQL language is designed to work and how relational databases were intended to be laid out. Chris obviously has a unique insight into those topics. One of the tenants of Chris’s teaching is that SQL is a complicated language and since comprehensive testing is almost never really feasible, it is important to write SQL using a disciplined approach based on the underlying relational theory. As a side note, I was talking to a few cohorts around the coffee pot today and was shocked to hear that one of the guys had a CS degree but was not required to take a relational theory class. Back when I got started that was the first class that people took, probably because there were almost no real implementations of the theory at that point. Oracle was just getting started and DB2 was still a distant gleam in Mr. Codd’s eye. But I digress.

It does seem to me that we have an awful lot of systems running on Oracle these days that were designed and written by people without a strong background in relational database fundamentals. I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve worked on systems that performed poorly due to poor SQL coding techniques and/or poor database design. Chris’s courses are designed to help you avoid these issues. So this is your chance to learn how to know for sure that your SQL is correct.

Hope to you see you there!