I just got a small e-mail from Laurent Schneider. He started a bold quest in writing a book about SQL programming called “Advanced Oracle SQL Programming“. I had the pleasure to meet Laurent, up in person, during my visit to Oracle Open World in San Francisco (2006).
He has a brilliant mind and likes, amongst challenging Chinese people into a chess game, to juggle with SQL puzzles and problems, and can be very creative like the examples he demonstrated with the XMLDB functions and regular expressions (see here). 
Despite the fact that he admitted that it won’t have examples like those of my collegaes Anton (“Solving a Sudoku with 1 SQL-statement: the Model-clause”) or Lucas (“Pie Charts in SQL – how pathetic can you get?”), regarding Sudoku puzzles and pie charts, I can’t believe this book won’t be mandatory lecture for all of us who needs to program with (and want to excel in) SQL (…and all us mere mortals who want to catch up…)
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