Reviews for Inside SQL Server 2000 Book/CD Package (DV-MPS Inside)

1. Great insight

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, December 12nd, 2004

   This book is not intended as a how-to book for database administrators. Instead, it explains what is going on "under the bonnet" so that you have a better understanding of what you can do about it. There are plenty of books that say "Do A then do B then do C". What Kalen Delaney does is explain why you might do these things or whether you might want to do something different.
   When I first got this book, I opened it at random, and came across a section on outer joins and NULLs. In a couple of pages I had learned not only the exact difference between "=NULL", "IS NULL" and "ISNULL()", but also the reasons for the differences (three-state logic) and a couple of useful techniques for avoiding common problems.
   Like a small handful of other technical books, it is beautifully written. It is for reading, not just referring to. The layout and printing are good, and, importantly, the binding allows the book to lie flat when opened at any page, even near the beginning or end. (The exception to this is the card insert for the accompanying CD, which has been annoyingly bound in the middle of the index.)
   Recommended, but not as your only book on SQL Server.

2. Probably the best SQL Server 2000 Book

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, June 12th, 2004

   I'm not joking either. Spending time on usergroups as I do THIS is the book that all other books are compared too.

   Its mastery is it contains bits of everything but written in a way to clearly explain tough concepts and makes it both readable and understandable.

   If you ask 5 MVP's for SQL Server to nominate 5 books, you will get them probabaly nominating there own or a friends, except for this book, its the experts expert book.

   By the way I am not a relative of the author or an employee of Microsoft, but if any of them would like to send me money for such a good review please feel free ;)

3. Will help you install / migrate large SQL databases

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, August 12th, 2002

   A recent company re-structure has meant that I have picked up the responsibility for the whole of one of our databases (rather than merely the accuracy of the information which went in it).

   Space was becoming an issue, and we had to upgrade in a hurry - Inside SQL Server 2000 was the book we chose. This is not a book for DBAs, but if you need to know some of the issues to consider when deploying / migrating a SQL Server installation, you will probably find (as I did) that this book will give you all the information you need.

   Highly recommended.

4. The bible of SQL Server 2000

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, April 12st, 2001

   Before Inside SQL Server 2000 came out, my favorite technical book on earth was Inside SQL Server 7. Up until today, there was no other book that I consulted with as much as I did with Inside 7. My copy is already in a very bad shape from overuse. I often consult with it whenever I am in doubt on any issue concerning SQL Server internals. I sometimes read from it to my students in class to prove a point. I had many expectations from inside SQL Server 2000 and I eagerly read every word in it. The book exceeded my expectations! Before it came out, I thought that it would have the same level of detail that Inside 7 had with additional discussions on SQL Server 2000s new features, but it goes far beyond that. In many areas it goes into smaller details than Inside 7 did discussing issues that I have never seen discussed in any other book or published document. For example, in the chapter about indexes DBCC PAGE is used extensively to actually traverse the B-Trees and examine the actual layout of the data in the index pages. By examining those, a lot of the points concerning the interesting index architecture that SQL Server uses become clearer. By getting to this level of detail, I feel that I have more adequate tools to make the right critical decisions in a system regarding which columns to index; on which column(s) to create the clustered index; space consumption of indexes on huge tables, and so on. The chapter also covers the new indexes on views and on computed columns. The chapter on locking discusses the locking architecture and the lock manager in detail but it also discusses internal lock structures such as Lock Blocks and Lock Owner Blocks in great depth. There is simply no way to get that information in any other source. Many internals related areas get more attention in Inside 2000 such as the storage engine and the relational engine. The query processor has a whole chapter of its own! The installation process is covered in great detail covering all the installation options, some of which are totally new, such as multi instances. It also covers hardware considerations such as RAID controllers, file system, memory and so on. The chapter on tables discusses internal page and row structures explaining every bit inside the row. T-SQL is not neglected either. Beyond programmatic aspects, Inside 2000 gets into the various internals and optimization aspects of the various constructs and handles query and performance tuning in depth. Among the topics that are covered are joins, subqueries, derived tables, user defined functions, stored procedures, transactions, referential integrity including the new cascading referential constraints, after and instead of triggers, views, cursors, large objects and more. Full-Text searching has a whole new section. Tough areas such as plan caching; auto parameterization and reuse of execution plans are also explained in detail. Join algorithms including nested loops, hash and merge are also explained. The coverage of data modification internals is outstanding! It includes coverage of page splits; the various internal update mechanisms such as in-place and non in-place updates; bulk inserts optimization and more. All these were just examples. The book is very rich in the areas that it covers and it is definitely a must for programmers and DBAs that really want to know their stuff as far as SQL Server is concerned. The book is a work of art.

5. Latest in a great series

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, December 12th, 2000

   If you like the previous two "Inside" Books, or even if you just have them on your bookshelf for reference, then get this one too. Don't expect it to hand-hold you through the product, give real-world examples of product usage, tell you how to code your queries etc. That's not what the book is about - there are plenty of other books that cover these and other subjects well.

   This book covers the internals of SQL 2000, how it works, how the optimiser does it's job, how the database pages are laid out - all the stuff you won't find documented anywhere else. This is the only book the SQL Server development team have put their first hand knowledge into, so if you're really interested in how the product works and is architected then buy this book (or get a job on the SQL Server development team).