Developing Robust Date and Time Oriented Applications in Oracle Cloud: A comprehensive guide to efficient date and time management in Oracle Cloud

The book title "Developing Robust Date and Time Oriented Applications in Oracle Cloud" is completely in-line with the content. I was surprised by the myriad of possibilities in date/time control. Chapters are organized rationally, the content of each will provide the reader what the title promises. No fog at all. The depth of the matter coverage is very useful for developers, however teachers and students will find every aspect of date/time in one place. Every corner of the domain is touched thoroughly. The book offered me so much new and exciting. I actually used some tricks for APEX application. IMHO this book is the definitive guide to write better apps. This book is not for absolute beginners, but if they read it, a whole new territory will be discovered. For professionals, this book is 5*.

This is a great book for new or experienced Oracle Developers who want to understand everything about time management. It starts with a clear explanation about what is the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and their components and deployment models. It comes with examples and real life scenarios. It also covers the topic of loading data into an Oracle database as well as migration scenarios for moving Oracle workload from on-premises into the Oracle Cloud. Finally you will dive into relational databases and integrity related to temporal management, date-value definitions, as well as week management and ordinal date definition by focusing on specific aspects of Oracle Database.

Chapter 1 covers important cloud concepts and overall Oracle database architecture, so there's plenty of value in this chapter as a standalone resource.Chapter 2 dives into data loading, using familiar tools (SQL Loader, SQL Developer). It was also nice to coverage of SQL Developer Web, a relatively recent product and a critical part of the dev tool offerings in the Oracle cloud. I felt the coverage of external tables could have been more extensive, but that is a minor criticism. For the traditionalist, old style export and import (exp/imp) are also covered. The importance of data loading really comes into its own if you're looking to migrate database from on-premise to Oracle cloud. Readers are also advised to check out the ZDM offerings.Chapter 3/4 are where we really start to dig into the driving motivations of the book - date and time management. These chapters will be a revelation for the novice, who until now may have felt that the world of time management was simple due to ignorance of the true complexities and idiosyncracies of handling dates and times. The topic of temporality in these chapters alone will have people rethinking if they *really* have mastered things in their existing databases.Chapters 5,6,7 deal with the "day to day" usage and management of the various data/time/interval data types offered in the Oracle database. There's good coverage of data type conversions, limitations of each data type and how to get around them.Chapter 8 is particularly valuable to anyone who has had the luxury of working with single region databases in the past, and now is heading into internet-style applications. Suddenly things like languages, timezones, territory settings all have a significant impact on how you deal with dates and times. If you're new to NLS in the Oracle database, this is a chapter for you.Chapter 9,10,11 delve into how to model your database designs to reflect the nuances of dates and times covered in previous chapters. In reading these chapters, I was torn between the fact that there's a very good coverage of the issues but also the fact that so very few people stop to do any sort of data modelling at all nowadays. Does this make the content less useful? I don't believe so - hopefully it may inspire a new generation of data modellers, although I'd recommend having a solid base in data modelling principles otherwise the chapter might prove challenging. There is also coverage of the native temporal facilities in the Oracle database - something very few developers seem to be aware of.Chapters 12,13,14 are a somewhat "out of place" selection of topics, although in their own right they are worthwhile as standalone topics. In these chapters, topics covered include building calendars in SQL, flashback technology and SQL injection. The coverage is solid and will be useful for developers, even though they seem perhaps a touch out of place with the overall theme of the book.Chapter 15/16 are logically extensions to the earlier treatment of NLS, but broadened to the very important topic of how to deal with building applications/databases that will have a worldwide audience. Many applications that are built locally and expanded to a global audience ultimately fail for number of potential reasons (scale, NLS, timezones etc). This chapter talks about the pitfalls and challenges, and how to copy with them. It was an excellent way to round off all of the concepts covered throughout the rest of the book.This is a good book to add to your tech bookshelf.Full disclosure: I was sent a free copy of this book for review, but the author/publisher had no say in what the review contains and no preview of it before it was made public.