Open Dental Forum

Can any one recommend a book to learn how to write my own Query's?
...I usually like to mine my own stats and info and I feel like the OD Query list is good but I'd like to be able to stylize things and tweak them some times.

I have no programming experience but am very tech savvy
They actually have a MySQL for dummies book available but I think it may be too brief.

Thx!

I started out by modifying existing queries and then asking for help when I didn't understand why it didn't work. It helps to have an understanding of how a database is built so that book you have may be brief but it will probably help with some key concepts. Once you start to try and make your own more complex queries, you can post them on the forum for help troubleshooting if it's not working and hopefully you'll learn every time you do that. Once you start to get into it more you'll want to look at http://www.opendental.com/manual/progra ... urces.html which has a list of all the tables in the database so you can find the info you want. Good luck!

I would search online for mysql tutorials for examples and then just jump in. We'll help you.

drtmz

My advice is try to really understand what the different types of joins (inner, outter, etc). do and how they affect results. Once you've mastered the power of joining tables together the rest is relatively trivial. http://www.w3schools.com/ has a good generic SQL tutorial. Just be careful, sometimes MySQL wants queries written in a specific way. When in doubt, fall back to the MySQL 5.5 ref manual: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/