How do you continue to improve your SQL skills? [closed]

Question

How do SQL developers go about keeping up on current techniques and trends in the SQL world? Are there any blogs, books, articles, techniques, etc that are being used to keep up to date and in the know?

There are a lot of opportunities out their for OO, procedural, and functional programmers to take part in a variety of open source projects, but it seems to me that the FOSS avenue is a bit more closed for SQL developers.

Thoughts?

Answer 1

Find challenging questions that test your TRANSACT-SQL knowledge ... personally I enjoy Joe Celko's SQL Puzzles and Answers.

Joe Celko's SQL Puzzles and Answers http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51DTJ099P7L._SL500_BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-dp-500-arrow,TopRight,45,-64_OU01_AA240_SH20_.jpg

Answer 2

The thing about the SQL language is that it is pretty much a static target. Pretty soon you are looking at increasing your understanding of set theory and the problem domain itself rather than the details of the language.

The real meat is on either side of the language, in either the databases themselves (how to store, retrieve, and organize large data sets) or in the applications (with ORMs and such)