SQL Sam

SQL Sam, SQL Detective

I'm sitting at the Bellevue Starbucks watching people come and go in the bookstore next door. My son talked me into coming here so he could "study."

He's standing at the magazine rack now, looking at a copy of Men's Exercise. This month's coverboy is a robust repository of muscular mass. He must be all of 19 years old. The woman in me finds him mildly interesting. The mother in me wants to slap the kid silly and tell him to go get dressed before all the other mothers see him.

I'm looking at a pile of computing magazines, trying to concentrate on an article about knowledge repositories. Frankly, the article is dry and tiresome. It's the cyberbabble. Computing magazines are particularly full of it.

What's easy to read? Fast-moving fiction. How about an ASP Time Travel Novel or a JavaScript Horror Mystery? Well, fiction lovers, wait no more. SWYNK.com has a new article series just for you. It's entitled The Adventures of SQL Sam, SQL Detective.

SQL Sam is a database detective in the tradition of author Steve Hontz's favorite kid detective: Encyclopedia Brown. Wherever database anomalies arise, SQL Sam is there to solve the case. I read Steve's first installment, SQL Sam and the Evil Twin, wondering if it would be any good. It was.

During his years as a consultant, Steve has collected a list of SQL "gotchas" and their solutions. He presents these in clear, detailed prose, keeping the whole experience light and easy with SQL Sam's help.

At the end of each page, Steve gives Anxious Answerers a chance to jump straight to the solution. There is also a "Turn on Clues" feature that highlights and defines specific details in the story. By the end, I understood the problem and the solution. I didn't have to read any of it twice. And I didn't snooze off even once.

My son wanders over and plops the Men's Fitness magazine down on my table. I glance once more at its cover. Mr. Muscles stares back sullenly, hands on hips. His only attire is a tiny pair of orange terry-cloth shorts, a presentation layer that fully exploits the underlying business layer, revealing nearly every private detail of all his embedded systems.

I look questioningly at my son. "Do you want to look like this in five years?"

"Well I don't plan to DRESS that stupid!" He rolls his eyes. "But I want muscles just like his!"

I sigh and put the computing magazines away. Enough cyberbabble for one day. I'm going home to sleuth out more web mysteries, right after I take my son to the gym.

Watch out Encyclopedia Brown. Here comes SQL Sam. He's fun. He's informative. And he makes computing magazines look even more dry than they did before.