Oracle Regular Expressions Pocket Reference (Pocket Reference (O'Reilly)) [Kindle Edition]

This pocket-sized 60-page booklet covers only one topic: the regular expression support in Oracle Database 10g. And it covers it well. Though the book's cover says "pocket reference", the book actually contains both a short tutorial and a reference.

The tutorial does a good job of explaining basic regular expression concepts. It doesn't provide a lot of examples or detailed explanations. But if you're apt and don't mind to experiment a little, it'll probably be all you need. Oracle's regular expression flavor is fairly limited, so there aren't many tricky concepts to explain.

The second half of the book is the actual reference. The first part of the reference lists all of the available regular expression tokens, along with a brief but clear description of what the token matches, and one or two examples. The examples use only literal text, so you can try them in Oracle without needing a particular example database.

The second part of the reference describes Oracle's four regular expression functions: REGEXP_INSTR, REGEXP_LIKE, REGEXP_REPLACE and REGEXP_SUBSTR. All the parameters that these four functions accept are fully explained, with clear indications of what all the possible values for these parameters will do. The book shows several examples for each function, again using only literal text. You can easily replace the strings with column names in your actual SQL code.

The final part of the reference lists all 10 error codes that the regexp functions can trigger, along with a one-paragraph description explaining exactly what the error is about (which isn't always obvious from the error messages themselves).

All in all this is an excellent little book. It's probably all you need to successfully use regular expressions with Oracle.

Many people recommend Mastering Regular Expressions to go along with the Oracle book. I disagree. Oracle implements POSIX regular expressions, which are a fairly limited subset of modern Perl-style regular expressions. (Actually, Perl's regex syntax is a significant extension of POSIX.) Mastering Regular Expressions barely mentions POSIX, and never mentions Oracle. It mostly talks about the advanced regex features in Perl, Java, .NET and PHP. If you use any of these languages, buying both Mastering Regular Expressions and Oracle Regular Expressions is certainly a good idea. But if you're a database administrator working solely with Oracle, the Oracle Regular Expressions Pocket Reference is all you need.

"ORACLE Regular Expressions" is a booklet about the new ORACLE 10g SQL functions that work with regular expressions:

- REGEXP_INSTR
- REGEXP_LIKE
- REGEXP_REPLACE
- REGEXP_SUBSTR

The authors describe the new functions and the ORACLE regular expression dialect (what kind of patterns the regexp engine handles).

The book consists of five chapters:

- Tutorial (an introduction into regular expressions)
- ORACLE's regular epression support (the functions, NLS support, Perl vs. ORACLE regular expressions)
- Regular Expression Quick Reference (explanation of the regexp dialect that ORACLE understands, what metacharacters does what and so on)
- ORACLE Regular Expression Functions (who to call the four functions mentioned above)
- ORACLE Regular Expression Error Messages (the new ORA- errors related to regexps)

Unfortunately I had no access to an ORACLE 10g database at the time of writing this review (ORACLE 10g was not available for download the "normal" users yet), so that I was not able to test the new functions and the examples in this book (although I am looking forward to do this sooon).

I think that "ORACLE Regular Expressions" is not sufficient to learn Regular Expressions from scratch but this was not the goal of this book anyway. If you are new to regular expressions, get J. Friedl's book "Mastering Regular Expressions" (the very best book about regular expressions in general). Afterwards "ORACLE Regular Expressions" will be perfect as a small reference book for the ORACLE regexp implementation.

I liked the comparison between ORACLE and Perl Regexp Support (I am a big Perl fan, and did lots of DBI programs on ORACLE with Perl). Unfortunately this book is missing an example on how to create a function based index to support REGEXP_LIKE queries (the possibility was mentioned) and get no full table scan.

The pocket reference book from O'Reilly does not contain an alphabetic index. However because of the good table of contents and the small size of the book, having an index is not really necessary.

This book provides not only the basics and some extras on the built-in Oracle utilities for regular expression handling, but also provides a nice "translation manuscript" if you are used to working with regular expressions in languages such as Perl, Java, C++, etc.

Great little reference and especially useful for translating your regular expressions between engines.