I've been meaning to post this, Joe's latest book Joe Celko's Thinking in Sets: Auxiliary, Temporal, and Virtual Tables in SQL is available on Amazon for about $24. Here's an excerpt of the excerpt:
"Joe Celko has looked deep into the code of novice SQL programmers and found a consistent and troubling pattern. These programmers have not changed their approach from writing code for a procedural language, like C, to a declarative language--which is what SQL is. As a result they are not fully using the power and capability inherent in SQL and that translates into writing more code than they need to write, more complex code than is needed, and ultimately lower productivity."
Haven't read it yet, just ordered my copy, but usually he has some pretty good ideas about how to solve problems. Hopefully this is more than a multi page rant!
We were lucky enough to have Joe come to Orlando to speak at SQLSaturday and we also talked him into doing a one day seminar about all things SQL. If you've read his books you know he sat on the SQL ANSI committee for a while and that he is one damned smart guy. If you've read his forum posts (on SSC or elsewhere) you're probably thinking that he's a curmudgeon, or worse!
So what's he really like? He readily admits to being a curmudgeon on the forums, but also says it's a persona he's adopted to try to blast people into learning about SQL in an effort to prove him wrong, and hopefully learning quite a bit in the process. I believe him about the persona, in person he's a great old guy to sit and talk with, polite, thoughtful, and somewhat stubborn! I told him I'm not sure I agree with him on how effective this online "Evil Celko" persona is, but we agreed to disagree and I couldn't help but laugh about it as we talked.
Brian & I had dinner with him on Thursday evening and that was quite a time. Joe's a wine drinker (but not to excess), always wears a black three piece suit (from JC Penny no less), and on this trip had on Mensa cuff links. Joe is pretty adamantly anti-identity column, where Brian & I are realistic enough to see that they are entirely useful tools in the SQL Server world. It proved to be an interesting conversation and while we didn't get Joe to change his views, I think I now understand his better. It's not the identity he's railing about, it's the fact that there can be gaps in the keys (failed insert, etc) and based on his background working in areas that require serious auditing its just a poor implementation. He prefers the use of a sequence table to guarantee no numbers are missed. I think it's splitting hairs and in a lot of cases the separate table isn't worth the effort. Maybe I'm wrong! But the highlight of the evening was when Brian misunderstoond (or Joe misspoke) Joe to say his wife was half his age. Joe is 60, give or take, and Brian just had to follow up on that! Turns out it's his niece that is half his age, but it still made for quite the amusing cap to a nice evening.
He's going to be doing some more seminars for us and probably consulting on some curriculm, but what I'd really like to see is MS or Sun or Google or Yahoo (maybe not Oracle!) hire him and see if he can push some of that theory into making the database world a better place. One of you 17 readers of my blog must know someone way up there!
We (End to End Training) will be hosting our Celko on SQL seminar tomorrow (Nov 9th). It's not too late to register and we will be able to accept a limited number of walk ins. If you're near Orlando it would be a shame not to see Celko live!
Registration link is http://www.endtoendtraining.com/public/classes/coursedetails.aspx?courseid=15.
