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 colleagues 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…)
The content is described as:
“Oracle SQL is one of the world’s most powerful dialects, packed with advanced functions and features that give Oracle SQL procedural language capabilities. Using these powerful features it is no longer necessary to embed Oracle SQL inside a procedural language, and native Oracle SQL can now be used to solve complex query problems.”
…and what bothers me the most (XML function abuser 😉 ) …
“This book shows important techniques on how to leverage Oracle’s powerful XML interface to quickly format Oracle data with XML for instant publication.”
For future information see Laurent’s website or the information on Rampants website. No doubt, this should be on our wish list.
