A Practical Approach - 2nd Edition Practical and easy to use, this book is ideal as an introductory textbook to a database learner (with an emphasis on SQL), but also as an aid to developing applications that use data and databases. It is designed to cover a wide range of topics that every database user faces: Introducing the fundamentals of the relational model and the Entity/Relationship model for describing data and databases, as well as the fundamentals of relational algebra with dozens of examples. Accompanying examples that demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of different database approaches and implementations. Detailed presentation of the SQL language with more than 1,100 examples and solved exercises. The second part of the book can be used in either a theoretical or a practical (laboratory) part of a database course, while the SQL examples can be run in a variety of different environments, such as MySQL, MS Access, OpenOffice Base, phpMyAdmin, etc. Extensions of using the SQL language in programming applications and integration into environments such as R (computational statistics), PHP (web applications), JAVA (Android applications), etc. Much of the book has been used as teaching material of an open academic course (video lectures), as taught at the University of Ioannina. Athanasios Stavrakoudis holds a PhD from the University of Ioannina. He worked as a visiting researcher at the universities of Nancy (France), Padua (Italy) and Western Ontario (Canada), and since 2000 he has been teaching at the Department of Economics at the University of Ioannina.