A practical approach - 2nd edition

Practical and user-friendly, this book is ideal as an introductory manual for a database learning program (with an emphasis on SQL), as well as a resource for developing applications that utilize data and databases. It has been designed in such a way as to cover a wide range of topics that every database user encounters: Presentation of the basic principles of the relational model and the Entity/Relationship model for describing data and databases, as well as the basic principles of relational algebra with dozens of examples.

Supplementary examples demonstrating the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches and database implementations. A detailed presentation of the SQL language with more than 1,100 examples and solved exercises. The second part of the book can be used in either a theoretical or practical (laboratory) section of a course related to databases, while the SQL examples can be executed in a variety of different environments, such as MySQL, MS Access, OpenOffice Base, phpMyAdmin, etc.

Extensions of the SQL language usage in programming applications and integration in environments such as R (computational statistics), PHP (web applications), JAVA (Android applications), etc. A significant portion of the book has been used as teaching material for an open academic course (video-recorded lectures), as taught at the University of Ioannina.

Athanasius Stavrakoudis holds a PhD from the University of Ioannina. He has worked as a visiting researcher at the universities of Nancy (France), Padua (Italy), and Western Ontario (Canada), and since 2000 has been teaching in the Department of Economics at the University of Ioannina.