Fuzzy Modeling and Genetic Algorithms for Data Mining and Exploration is a handbook for analysts, engineers, and managers involved in developing data mining models in business and government. As you'll discover, fuzzy systems are extraordinarily valuable tools for representing and manipulating all kinds of data, and genetic algorithms and evolutionary programming techniques drawn from biology provide the most effective means for designing and tuning these systems.
You don't need a background in fuzzy modeling or genetic algorithms to benefit, for this book provides it, along with detailed instruction in methods that you can immediately put to work in your own projects. The author provides many diverse examples and also an extended example in which evolutionary strategies are used to create a complex scheduling system.
* Written to provide analysts, engineers, and managers with the background and specific instruction needed to develop and implement more effective data mining systems.
* Helps you to understand the trade-offs implicit in various models and model architectures.
* Provides extensive coverage of fuzzy SQL querying, fuzzy clustering, and fuzzy rule induction.
* Lays out a roadmap for exploring data, selecting model system measures, organizing adaptive feedback loops, selecting a model configuration, implementing a working model, and validating the final model.
* In an extended example, applies evolutionary programming techniques to solve a complicated scheduling problem.
* Presents examples in C, C++, Java, and easy-to-understand pseudo-code.
* Extensive online component, including sample code and a complete data mining workbench.

"Advanced SQL:1999 - Understanding Object-Relational and Other Advanced Features" is the practitioner's handbook to the standard's advanced features. It is not a re-presentation of the standard, but rather an authoritative, in-depth guide to its practical application. Like its companion, "SQL:1999 - Understanding Relational Language Components," which explained the standard's basic features, this book will show you how to make your applications both effective and standard-compliant.

This handy reference has a modular format so you can explore specific topics with ease. It is equally useful to those upgrading from earlier versions of SQL and those with no previous experience. Written by the standard's distinguished editor, "Advanced SQL:1999" will complete your knowledge and support your skills like no other book can.
* Focuses entirely on the issues that matter to programmers who are connecting applications to databases.
* Details SQL:1999's object facilities, including structured user-defined types, typed tables, user-defined routines, and routine invocation.
* Examines facilities new to SQL, including those relating to on-line analytical processing (OLAP), management of external data (SQL/MED), and Java support.
* Covers the ongoing development of XML support.
* Includes appendices that cover the SQL:1999 annexes, a SQL:1999 example using UDTs, status codes, and useful information on the standardization process.

The most prominent Web applications in use today are data-intensive. Scores of database management systems across the Internet access and maintain large amounts of structured data for e-commerce, on-line trading, banking, digital libraries, and other high-volume sites.
Developing and maintaining these data-intensive applications is an especially complex, multi-disciplinary activity, requiring all the tools and techniques that software engineering can provide. This book represents a breakthrough for Web application developers. Using hundreds of illustrations and an elegant intuitive modeling language, the authors-all internationally-known database researchers-present a methodology that fully exploits the conceptual modeling approach of software engineering, from idea to application. Readers will learn not only how to harness the design technologies of relational databases for use on the Web, but also how to transform their conceptual designs of data-intensive Web applications into effective software components.
* A fully self-contained introduction and practitioner's guide suitable for both technical and non-technical members of staff, as well as students.
* A methodology, development process, and notation (WebML) based on common practice but optimized for the unique challenges of high-volume Web applications.
* Completely platform- and product-independent; even the use of WebML is optional.
* Based on well-known industry standards such as UML and the Entity Relationship Model.
* Enhanced by its own Web site (http: //www.webml.org), containing additional examples, papers, teaching materials, developers' resources, and exercises with solutions.

Tuning your database for optimal performance means more than following a few short steps in a vendor-specific guide. For maximum improvement, you need a broad and deep knowledge of basic tuning principles, the ability to gather data in a systematic way, and the skill to make your system run faster. This is an art as well as a science, and "Database Tuning: Principles, Experiments, and Troubleshooting Techniques" will help you develop portable skills that will allow you to tune a wide variety of database systems on a multitude of hardware and operating systems. Further, these skills, combined with the scripts provided for validating results, are exactly what you need to evaluate competing database products and to choose the right one.
* Forward by Jim Gray, with invited chapters by Joe Celko and Alberto Lerner
* Includes industrial contributions by Bill McKenna (RedBrick/Informix), Hany Saleeb (Oracle), Tim Shetler (TimesTen), Judy Smith (Deutsche Bank), and Ron Yorita (IBM)
* Covers the entire system environment: hardware, operating system, transactions, indexes, queries, table design, and application analysis
* Contains experiments (scripts available on the author's site) to help you verify a system's effectiveness in your own environment
* Presents special topics, including data warehousing, Web support, main memory databases, specialized databases, and financial time series
* Describes performance-monitoring techniques that will help you recognize and troubleshoot problems

"JDBC: Practical Guide for Java Programmers" is the quickest way to gain the skills required for connecting your Java application to a SQL database. Practical, tutorial-based coverage keeps you focused on the essential tasks and techniques, and incisive explanations cement your understanding of the API features you'll use again and again. No other resource presents so concisely or so effectively the exact material you need to get up and running with JDBC right away.

* Provides tutorial-based instruction in key JDBC techniques, complemented by example code.
* Centered around an incrementally developed example of a three-tiered application for a video rental e-commerce site.
* Designed to help you tackle standard JDBC tasks: connecting your database to the Internet, displaying query results, using stored procedures, updating the database, storing metadata, carrying out transactions, working with binary large objects, implementing security, and more.
* Via the companion Web site, provides code for the examples, tools for loading the example database, links to useful JDBC sites, and a forum in which to interact with other readers.

This isn't a book about the Object Data Standard; it's the complete,
fully authoritative version of the standard itself, presented by the
researchers who developed it. This book provides all the details
comprising ODMG 3.0, making the latest version of the specification
the most mature and most flexible yet.

When it comes to storing objects in databases, ODMG 3.0 is a
standard with which you need to be familiar-whether you design,
develop, or implement object database products, object-to-relational
database mapping products, or applications based on these products.
* Presents authoritative, completely up-to-date information not available anywhere else.
* Documents all the changes found in version 3.0, including enhancements to the Java language binding, greater semantic precision, and various improvements and corrections throughout the standard.
* Pays special attention to the broadening of the standard to support recent developments in object-to-database mappings (ODMs) that allow objects to be stored in relational databases.
* Provides a way to write Java, C++, or Smalltalk code that works with the entire spectrum of database products, while taking full advantage of your organization's preferred platform.
* Continues to cover everything retained from version 2.0, including key details relating to C++, Smalltalk, and Object Query Language.
* Establishes a level of stability for this increasingly important specification.

The definitive book on Oracle's Rdb database.
Written by a team of bestselling database experts, including a principal product architect, this is unquestionably the definitive book on Oracle's Rdb8, the latest version of the powerful database for advanced enterprise applications. Rdb: A Comprehensive Guide, Third Edition teaches administrators, programmers, database designers and IT managers the critical components and functions of the new version 8 and explains how to develop powerful Rdb8 programs. The book specifically addresses new Rdb8 management, tuning and scalability tools and describes the new Rdb/NT Workbench for Windows NT. No other source gives readers the authoritative and timely information provided by Rdb: A Comprehensive Guide, Third Edition.

Only book on Rdb8
Written by Rdb8 experts from Oracle, including the principal product architect
Explains how to use Rdb8 on both Windows NT and OpenVMS

Do you need an introductory book on data and databases? If the book is by Joe Celko, the answer is yes. "Data and Databases: Concepts in Practice" is the first introduction to relational database technology written especially for practicing IT professionals. If you work mostly outside the database world, this book will ground you in the concepts and overall framework you must master if your data-intensive projects are to be successful. If you're already an experienced database programmer, administrator, analyst, or user, it will let you take a step back from your work and examine the founding principles on which you rely every day-helping you to work smarter, faster, and problem-free.

Whatever your field or level of expertise, Data and Databases offers you the depth and breadth of vision for which Celko is famous. No one knows the topic as well as he, and no one conveys this knowledge as clearly, as effectively-or as engagingly. Filled with absorbing war stories and no-holds-barred commentary, this is a book you'll pick up again and again, both for the information it holds and for the distinctive style that marks it as genuine Celko.
* Supports its extensive conceptual information with example code and other practical illustrations.
* Explains fundamental issues such as the nature of data and data modeling, and moves to more specific technical questions such as scales, measurements, and encoding.
* Offers fresh, engaging approaches to basic and not-so-basic issues of database programming, including data entities, relationships and values, data structures, set operations, numeric data, character string data, logical data and operations, and missing data among others.
* Covers the conceptual foundations of modern RDBMS technology, making it an ideal choice for students.

Whether building a relational, object-relational, or object-oriented database, database developers are increasingly relying on an object-oriented design approach as the best way to meet user needs and performance criteria. This book teaches you how to use the Unified Modeling Language-the official standard of the Object Management Group-to develop and implement the best possible design for your database.

Inside, the author leads you step by step through the design process, from requirements analysis to schema generation. You'll learn to express stakeholder needs in UML use cases and actor diagrams, to translate UML entities into database components, and to transform the resulting design into relational, object-relational, and object-oriented schemas for all major DBMS products.
* Teaches you everything you need to know to design, build, and test databases using an OO model.
* Shows you how to use UML, the accepted standard for database design according to OO principles.
* Explains how to transform your design into a conceptual schema for relational, object-relational, and object-oriented DBMSs.
* Offers practical examples of design for Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, Informix, Object Design, POET, and other database management systems.
* Focuses heavily on re-using design patterns for maximum productivity and teaches you how to certify completed designs for re-use.

This book gives a theoretical base and a perspective for the analysis, design, and operation of information systems, particularly their information storage and retrieval (ISAR) component, whether mechanized or manual. Information systems deal with many types of entities: events, persons, documents, business transactions, museum objects, research projects, and technical parts, to name a few. Among the purposes the serve are to inform the public, to support managers, researchers, and engineers, and to provide a knowledge base for an artificial intelligence program. The principles discussed in this book apply to all these contexts. The book achieves this generality by drawing on ideas from two conceptually overlapping areas-data base management and the organization and use of knowledge in libraries-and by integrating these ideas into a coherent framework. The principles discussed apply to the design of new systems and, more importantly, to the analysis of existing systems in order to exploit their capabilities better, to circumvent their shortcomings, and to introduce modifications where feasible.

"Data Modeling Essentials, Third Edition" provides expert tutelage for data modelers, business analysts and systems designers at all levels. Beginning with the basics, this book provides a thorough grounding in theory before guiding the reader through the various stages of applied data modeling and database design. Later chapters address advanced subjects, including business rules, data warehousing, enterprise-wide modeling and data management.
The third edition of this popular book retains its distinctive hallmarks of readability and usefulness, but has been given significantly expanded coverage and reorganized for greater reader comprehension. Authored by two leaders in the field, "Data Modeling Essentials, Third Edition" is the ideal reference for professionals and students looking for a real-world perspective.
- Thorough coverage of the fundamentals and relevant theory.
- Recognition and support for the creative side of the process.
- Expanded coverage of applied data modeling includes new chapters on logical and physical database design.
- New material describing a powerful technique for model verification.
- Unique coverage of the practical and human aspects of modeling, such as working with business specialists, managing change, and resolving conflict.
- Extensive online component including course notes and other teaching aids (www.mkp.com).
UML diagrams now available! Visit the companion site for more details.
Click here to view a book review by Steve Hoberman!