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Summary: A good Book to understand SQL Server's Architecture
Review: I'm beginning to relate Ken as the Tom Kyte of Oracle. Ken writes the book excellently and provides as much meat as you can dig in. The book is excellently written and like the other two.
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Summary: Wow
Review: Bar none, no one knows more about SQL Server than Mr. Henderson. This book goes into more subjects at a finer detail than any other SQL Server book ever written. It's kind of humbling, and I think most SQL Server DBA's & programmmers need that. :)
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Summary: SELECT This FROM ThePlethora WHERE content = 'complete'
Review: What can I say: this guy starts a SQL Server book on explaining you how Windows kernel works and spends an entire chapter on the memory management mechanism (throwing some C/C++ and Assembly here ad there)!
I bet some Microsoft folk will be using this too...
He already wrote an excellent one, but I definitely didn't expect this much onthis edition.
Great.
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Summary: Last in series with publisher, pushed out flavor
Review: It is written that this book is the product of procrastination. The last in the AW contract with this author, and it shows. The books appears to have been thrown together with a hodge podge of topics that have NOTHING to do with each other. The win32 coverage is not only way late and old hat, but the rest of the book has novice material written all over it. Topics drawn from bol and visual studio, you will learn nothing about using SQL in the enterprise. No mention of any of the MOST important aspects of sql today. No mention of security. This is a major missing portion especially when the code on the CD is very questionable on it's ability to NOT mess with your production system's security. No cube processing which is a demand of ALL customers in 2004. I've worked with shops as small as 5 staffed IT depts that are being forced in to doing OLAP due to demand. The trend is everywhere. This book is so far behind where the world is in regards to SQL server.
No .NET
No enterprise remoting discussion
No OLAP
No visuals at all. Give a feeling of walking in the dark.
No material that is not laced with old school ideas and thoughts
No explanation of what any stored proc is used for nor how it could tie into an enterprise object. That is because there is not tie in.
This list could go on and on.
This book, even with the piles of votes and childlike reviews of the junior high mentality, has no place on the desk of any current professional. None of our team nor any of our partners will use it due to the lack of any real worth.
Maybe most importantly is there is NO reference material. There are short essays where the author shows off his admitted love of prose where we'd have loved some reference pages, but it would have been too little too late anyway as far as we're concerned. Very beginner material with no repeat value. You won't ever go back to it.
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Summary: DID NOT UNDERSTAND THE ADS?
Review: The ads all have this as the best book on everything. They all have helpful votes piled up on them in 10 minutes time.
I think, like others, that is fake.
Read the reviews and you too will see they follow a low intelligence generalized method of marketing.
the book is weak in all areas. nothing in the book is cohesive or would be used to write enterprise code. weak on XML
weak on writing style
absent of reference material
absent of examples
absent of being up to date on the technology
weak on stored procs, they are not tied back to anything.
weak on idioms. very obvious beginner statements. This book is either for junior high students or is poorly written and has a large sales force. One of the force shows under sourceforge.net, a marketing firm that you hire to put in good words on your product. Makes me wonder on this one If you read through the child like reviews you too will see there is a pattern undeniably done by a marketing force.
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Summary: No refererence, no teaching, material is novice level
Review: First about me: I employ over 5000 developers working on SQL server solutions for some of the largest companies in the world. Now about the book: It contains zero reference material. There are no quick lookups on anything related to sql server a professional needs at her fingertips. Found that distracting. There is no conclusion to most topics, it's as though the author did not know how to finish, or start for that matter, and each chapter is ALL TEXT with no visual reference points at all. It's like trying to learn to operate an aircraft without ever getting inside it and flying it. That is exactly what it feels like. Also there is no continuity of topics or subject. Very weak in this area The examples never go beyond the type of a few column, a favorite is one column has an identity field the other null or an integer if something really finally happens. Not instructive to my people in the least. None of the entire team will use any of these btw. The ads are too child-like. If you read through them you find "best ever", "grandslam", "wowed me" things you expect to see a child write about their favorite childrens book. They are like that throughout. Also, the ads follow a distinct pattern which others keep addressing but they get talked over with the child like ads. If a woman puts out an opinion on this series that is not great, new reviews show up immediately say how great the book is in the exact areas she found weak. Another child like action that has my team rolling. They always say the writer must have a hundred thousand relatives. The number or helpful votes on new ads show up right away in lots of 30 to 50. We've never seen anything so fake. In one morning in an hours time I was told 50 votes were put on the book in 5 minutes time. That was all 3 books. 50 times the number of reviews of all books!
Again this morning it happen after a few 3 star or maybe 2 star reviews. We don't understand this system of large numbers of childlike people doing this? It sure doesn't sell it to us as we would never buy another volume again after finding how weak they are in all areas. They are very behind the times. No information that is current or relevant. You will be very disappointed. guaranteed.
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Summary: A must-read
Review: This book is a must-read for anyone working with Sql Server. I am self-employed (I design Web sites) so I have to rely on books for most of my technical info. Classes are simply to expensive - both time-wise and money-wise. My wife also works with Sql Server in her job and has found this book invaluable to. She tries to steal my copy all the time. She came home from the office the other day and said they had bought a bunch of copies for the engineers at the office to use. Maybe now she will leave mine alone. I don't write many book reviews but thought this one deserved it. It easily has more useful data about Sql Server than all of my other Sql Server books combined. I hope you get as much out of it as I have.
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Summary: Taught me the right questions to ask
Review: We had been having a problem with Sql Server hanging that we had been working with MS Support for about 3 mos with no joy. The system would hang during critical jobs and was causing us some real grief. I got this book and began reading through it. When I got to the chapter on the User Mode Scheduler component I knew I was on to something. We have a third-party accounting application on our system that uses extended procedures all over the place. The book mentions that extended procedure abuse can limit concurrency on a system and even shows an example of how to basically hang a system by flooding it with such things. After I read this, I asked the MS technician if this could be our issue. I had never mentioned the extreme extended proc use because I didn't know it was significant. He said it could well be and had me get some diagnostic info from our server that confirmed this. Apparently one of the accounting app's extended procedures was hanging and bringing down the whole system. We alerted our third-party vendor to this and had a fix within a couple of days. Thanks to this book I knew the right questions to ask. I still don't know half the book teaches (might need to read another time or two) but that alone was invaluable to me.
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Summary: A n expert developer's perspective on Sql internals
Review: I have Delaney's book on Sql internals and absolutely love it. It has been my companion through thick and thin since we upgraded to Sql Server 2000. Having said that, I think this book takes things to the next level. Its sheer volume of technical info and code is simply staggering. The example code alone in this book is worth comment. It comes in just about every language you can touch Sql Server with: VB.NET, C#, VB6, C, C++, Delphi, assembly language, CMD files, T-Sql, and a few others I'm probably forgetting. This is truly a developer's look at how Sql works under the hood. Starting off with some discussion of Windows internals was a very good idea. I have been developing for Windows since 3.1 days, and I learned a good deal I didn't know and several things that helped me understand why Sql works the way it does. The "chapter pairs" concept that the author describes is done quite well. I haven't seen anyone else try this but I wish more would. Aside from exploring Sql from a developer's perspective, the book also provides plenty of original software itself. So you get both the developer's take on things and you get some code he gives you just for stopping by - not a bad deal.
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Summary: Best reference on Sql
Review: I probably have every book written on Sql. I have my favorites, but this has quickly made it's way to the top of my list. Every time I turn around I find myself referring to it to really understand how Sql works. I have never been the kind of person who would settle for thin explanations or not really knowing how something I rely on works. This book gives me the ability to truly understand the best database on the planet. It gives me the tools I need to build worldclass applications designed around Sql. That alone is worth the price of admission. I have Inside Sql Server and think the two books compliment each other very well. They each cover things the other doesn't. If you have those two books you have what you need to understand Sql server's inner design extremely well. I feel I now have a better grasp of some parts of Sql that I do of systems I've designed and built myself! The other great thing about this book is how well written it is. I found it an really easy read...tough to stop reading at times. You add to that the most comprehensive technical info on Sql and you have a really terrifc reference work!
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