I started reading this book by Jonathan Gennick about a week ago. After a couple of
chapters I realized this book is more a reference than a book you
should read from A through Z. I am really an Oracle guy. I think I
know a lot about the PL/SQL and I think I know a lot about SQL as
well. It’s fun to see how much of this knowledge can be applied to
other databases as well. This reference is a nice book to get ideas on
how other databases help us developers and maybe even create some of
the functions in the Oracle environment.
This book shows most of the functions available in all databases and
how they differ from environment to environment. It describes just
about all the functions you will ever need in your day to day work.
When you need to do something that is not described in this book, then
you are probably better off by diving into the specific documentation
for your preferred database.
As said, this book is a good reference for your basic needs. If you
need to make application database independent (which IMHO is a really
bad idea, but that’s something else) you can use this reference to see
what is supported in all the different RDBMS’s.