This book is primarily intended for a training or educational environment in a College, University, or technical school. It has two specific goals: The first one is to train the student on Access SQL from its most basic statements to the level of a skilled professional. The second and equally important is to expose the student to the usage of SQL in the business world. That is why all the examples have a business purpose such as inventory replenishment, order reporting, shipping calculations, customer segmentation, cycle-time calculations and a myriad of other business related topics. As such, this book will be a very good fit for an MIS class in a business school. To that purpose it contains more than 300 exercises in its 31 chapters which the student can complete during class time. It also contains ten questions after each chapter which the instructor can use for in class discussions or test generation. There are 320 questions in total in the book. Finally, it contains sixty-two case studies, two at the end of each chapter, for additional work as homework or for sharpening the skills learned in each chapter.The book is the culmination of Pindaro's 15 years of teaching on various database subjects at the University level in three different business schools. He taught at all levels, from freshmen to executives with all the inherited fun and challenges. After hundreds of labs and thousands of questions and comments from the students, Pindaro wrote this book to assist the students in becoming SQL experts so that they can be absolutely successful with their manipulation of data in the working environment. Currently, no matter the position, industry, or job function, it looks like everyone is asking for SQL skills.For the instructor, Pindaro tried to make this book as friendly as possible. First, he personally tested the book in class to see how the labs work in the real training environment. Second, he has provided a multitude of case studies and questions on real business scenarios so that the students can appreciate the power of SQL for work and business. Third, He has also prepared a separate booklet that the instructor can receive as a pdf/word file (upon confirmation of instructor status) that includes the solutions to all the case studies. If the instructor still has any questions, Pindaro is always available for help at alphapress@hotmail.com. He loves responding to questions. The goal is to learn how to use databases for real business tasks. Pindaro has worked on hundreds of business databases and operational systems for the last 19 years. Pindaro's exciting relationship with databases started with DBase III back in 1991, continuing with all versions of Access since early 1993, and working with MS SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, and IBM DB2 for a number of years. He is still in love with all of them. After twenty years, he still works with data, information processing, integration, and dissemination.
