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Rating: 
Summary: Very VB oriented -- Pretty light on DTS
Review: I bought this book to assist me with a project that required moving and manipulating data between heterogeneous data sources. DTS seemed to be the right tool to do this and that proved to be true in the end.However, this book was not a great assistance. The authors fill the book with various VB examples, which would be great, if I was augmenting my DTS packages with VB - but I wasn't. Rather, what would have been of great, are examples of raising errors, handling non-tabular input and output, and any nuances not revealed in Microsoft's help documents (which ended up being my main source of help). In short, unless you are looking strictly for VB answers to DTS questions, I'd wait to see what other books come out. And they will, because DTS actually works great once its set up correctly.
Rating: 
Summary: Solved one major problem.
Review: I cant speak to this book in its entirety, as I dont usually buy tech books to read them; rather when I encounter an obstacle I thrash thru books until I find something that addresses that obstacle, putting them back on the shelf once the problem is resolved. Thus, to me, the quality of a programming book is how helpful they are in solving obscure problems that usually are hard-to-impossible to find documentation for. Background: I primarily use VB and T-SQL to convert/transform environmental data from over 500 independent sources on a regular or sporadic release cycle into a site-organized perspective which I then convert into attribute-centric XML (each string the totality of a single site and all of its related children) to be stored in a single text field with its site info also stored in other fields as a header, id'd by GUIDs. We collect massive amounts of data in a wide variety of formats which we transform using 3rd party apps, custom apps, and when necessary via a Hand Keying agency for paper datasets. Our data process is many-stepped and complex and involves moving data between different formats and many different SQL Servers at various stages. To expedite this, a co-worker and I have written a collection of automation apps and utilities. However, at 2 different points in the process sombody has to manually DTS data either into SQL (typically from MSAccess which we use a convenient intermediary for analysis and conversion) or from SQL Server to SQL Server. The DTS Wizard makes this easy, but nevertheless manual, and therefore inefficient (and repititious/annoying). Previously we had played around with various methods of using packages, building packages on the fly, and more esoteric methods but due to the sheer diversity of incoming data and inconcistencies in format from data providers, nothing worked better or more easily than just biting the bullet and manually using the DTS Wizard. Recently, my coworker came across this book and noticed that, while most of it seems pretty uninteresting, Chapter 10 had very simplified code for creating simple DTS packages on the fly. The code & documentation we had found previously seemed to occlude/complicate the matter significantly, to the point that implementation would be too time consuming. However, the code in this book was easily adaptable to our purposes and in conjunction with some of our existing tools could become the basis of an in-line solution, removing the irritating manual DTS Wizard portion of our process. So, this book gets 3 stars on the basis of solving a single irritating issue thats been a thorn in our side for some time now. Be warned however, that we had to tape a yellow sticky over one of the writer's portraits; we kept having an unpleasant reaction everytime we looked at the book's cover. When you see it up close yourself, you'll understand what I mean...... ;)
Rating:
Summary: Crash course in SQL DMO SQL NS
Review: I found this book to be a big help in creating SQL DMO applications. I got some ideas for incorporating server and application roles via DMO, automating free log space counting and archiving via detach and attach, a way to limit extending the server's context for xp_cmdshell and ways to produce lists for users that are absent from EM (it may be simple, but there *is* no list of triggers for example, and the DMO EnumXXXX methods are a lot easier to deal with than ado's moreresults, when queries return more than one result set). I am a vfp programmer, but in manipulating an object model, the ideosynchrosies of the language aren't supposed to count for much, so I found it straightforward to translate the vb into vfp, and found my way.
Rating: 
Summary: ALL I needed to know about DMO
Review: I had to write some programs for work that involved getting into the DMO objects of SQL Server, and this book was simply invaluable to me in understanding the objects better and helping me to produce a program that I am really proud of. I have not checked out the other sections of this book, however the books from this lot (wrox) tend to be very good, with useful, real-life examples and detailed explanations. I also used a similar book from them to learn ASP. I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book. Does just what it says it does.
Review: I was discouraged from getting this book for a while because of the other reviews on this page, but when I really needed an additional reference for SQL-DMO, I went ahead for whatever I could get from the book. I have read through the portion of the book (The chapters, not the appendices - they are more for reference).
First, the book is not just a rehash of the SQL SBO, nor of the reference on MSDN. It was my frustration with searching through them, getting explanations that did not always offer enough of an example to really clear up the concept in my mind that led me to seek another book. The chapters in this book do lead the reader through examples, and do solidify the concepts I was looking to have solidified such as the practicalities of the object Heirarchy. Once you have this part firmly in mind, then MSDN, and SQL SBO's endless diagrams and cryptic descriptions begin to make more sense. As for the examples being in VB, I program in C++ and Perl. I very, very seldom use VB or any of its variants, but it is so simple that there is no problem whatsoever in translating the examples from the VB in the book to the languages I use. The object model is the same regardless of the language, the languages just have a little different notation in accessing the properties and methods. For example: VBS: Private dSrv
Private dDb
Set dSrv = CreateObject("SQLDMO.SQLServer")
call AddSurvey("MyCompany", "MySurvey", "MyDbName")
Call dSrv.Connect("(local)", "sa", "changed")
Set dDb = CreateObject("SQLDMO.Database")
dDb.Name = "myDb"
dSrv.Databases.Add(dDb) 'set some db options:
private dbOption
set dbOption = dDb.DBOption
dbOption.SelectIntoBulkCopy = 0
dbOption.TruncateLogOnCheckpoint = 0
dbOption.AutoCreateStat = 0
dbOption.AutoShrink = 1
dbOption.AutoUpdateStat = 0 MsgBox dDb.Script Is this in Perl: use Win32;
use Win32::OLE; my $srv = Win32::OLE->new('SQLDMO.SQLServer'); $srv->Connect('(local)', 'sa', 'changed');
my $db = Win32::OLE->new('SQLDMO.Database');
$db->{Name} = 'MyDb';
$srv->Databases->Add($db);
my $option = $db->DBOption();
$option->{SelectIntoBulkCopy} = 0;
$option->{TruncateLogOnCheckpoint} = 0;
$option->{AutoCreateStat} = 0;
$option->{AutoShrink} = 1;
$option->{AutoUpdateStat} = 0; Win32::MsgBox($db->Script()); As anyone can see that takes even a few seconds to look at those two scripts for creating a database, the object model is exactly the same. The scripts are doing exactly the same thing. The only difference is in the language syntax, and there is such a direct correlation even there that it is very easy to translate from the examples in the book into the languages I prefer to use. For C++, chapter 12 is dedicated to setting up and creating projects in C++. From there, it is just using the C++ syntax to access the same object heirarchy. In my opinion, the book does what it says it does, and was helpful, and clear in developing a better understanding within me of using SQL-DMO, SQL-NS, and DTS in my development. Steve Howard
Rating: 
Summary: Professional SQL Server SQL-DMO, SQL-NS and DTS
Review: This is an absolute rehash of the SQL Server Books Online, the samples are too. It is very light on DMO, SQL Namespace Objects and DTS. It is all very basic, does not explain the main concepts of SQL-DMO, does not explain the meta data cache for example. The biggest part of the book are the Appendix which are object models and rehashes of Microsoft matrials.
Rating:
Summary: Not enough on DTS
Review: This is the first book to come out on DTS that I'm aware of. Unfortunatly, this book is heavily focused on the development of VB apps that work with SQL Server. There is a pretty good DTS object heirarchy in the appendix, but the 2 chapters on DTS cover only the basics.
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