Summer of SQL and Data Mining

Summer may be the best semester at George Washington University because all the undergrads are gone. The Marvin center is almost completely vacant, and the food court is closed. I am taking two electives this summer, which will give me more electives than I need. Why am I doing this? I’m actually learning something useful. People keep asking me why I don’t go for the CIO Certification. Instead of doing databases, I’d be taking MGT 272 Information Resource Management and MGT 274 Survey of Advanced IT Technologies. I have yet to read a single government job description that even mentions CIO Certification. (The Government Services Administration “invented” the CIO Certification, but the Office of Personnel Management sets job standards.)

I’ve taken academic classes in Information Systems at GWU for a while, and I have also taken classes at Learning Tree in SQL, Exchange, Solaris, Security and the programming language, C. The more advanced my classes get at GWU, the more they resemble a Learning Tree class, with one exception: at GWU, they teach theory and practice. At Learning Tree, it’s just practice. You can learn how Microsoft SQL Server works without learning a thing about normalization. Learning Tree is training database administrators, not database designers. My professor for both classes, John Artz, argues that vendor certifications will include more theory in the future; otherwise the vendor certs will become less relevant over time.

So what are my classes? Data Warehouse Design; and Database and Expert Systems. Database and Expert Systems includes no expert systems (I covered them in Decision Systems), and is mostly T-SQL for Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Data Warehouse Design is mostly theory with some implementation on SQL 2005 Analysis Services. Relational database theory hasn’t changed in about 30 years now, so you’d think I would have learned more relational database management systems earlier, but hey, it’s easy to become distracted with security and email and the web servers and Linux. Not that I haven’t used plenty of relational databases as back-ends to applications – I just didn’t think about the relational algebra that drives my queries.

While I can’t post class notes here, I can tell you which books the professor has chosen. When I’m searching for technology books, it’s hard to tell which ones are good.
Database and Expert Systems:
Dusan Petkovic’s SQL Server 2005: A Beginner’s Guide
Ken England’s Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Performance Optimization and Tuning Handbook. (There isn’t one for SQL 2005 yet.)
Data Warehouse Design:
Ted Lachev’s Applied Microsoft Analysis Services and Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform 2005.
(And the John Artz manuscript.)
Both classes:
Connolly and Begg’s Database Systms. This is the book I wish my database class from last semester used. It covers a lot more than that textbook: Hoffer, Prescott and McFadden’s Modern Database Management.