Aleph and SQL

One of the Aleph breakout sessions today was a beginner's SQL reporting workshop. The session was led by Mike Rogers of University of Tennessee. Mike really did a good job of covering a wide variety of topics in about an hour and a half. He covered the basics of how to login to an SQL session from the command line and how to get out of SQL sessions. He also went into more detail about how to get the information that you need to structure queries. He recommended that anyone wanting to really do alot of query work becom very familiar with the Oracle z-tables dictionary and the files relationship diagram, both of which Ex Libris has developed. I think both are available online from EL.

One of the most helpful things Mike offered was describing the five questions he asked to form queries. His presentation should be posted on the conference proceedings page later, so I won't put it down here. He discussed how to join tables and how to create and run scripts. Also helpful was the way he described their naming conventions for scripts.

I knew Aleph was extremely configurable, but I really had no idea that you could set up scripts that could be executed directly through the GUI via scripts. Mike explained how to do all of this, and much of it seemed pretty simple. I am sure the devil would show up in the details, though.