As the title suggests, Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2000 is part of Microsofts Inside series, and the third in the series of books about Microsoft SQL Server. The book is in many ways the only accurate source of information about the internals of the product. It is well written and easy to follow. I found the book to be a good read and worth my time.
Kalen Delaney has been working on SQL Server since the earliest days of the product, as well as with its grandfather, Sybase. Shes been closely associated with the development team and when working on this book had an office in the same building. Although not a part of the development team, her background and her location sitting in the development team gives her the "inside" view of the product in many ways.
If you are purchasing this book after having read the Inside SQL Server 6.5 or Inside SQL Server 7.0 books, you are in for a change. The focus of this book is still essentially on the internals of the product. However, this book is much more comprehensive than previous editions. It covers installation topics, database and file information, and the basic objects within SQL Server. It also covers basic transact-SQL, including SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE. As a long-time user and now member of the development team of SQL Server, I skimmed over many of these topics -- except for the new features of SQL Server 2000.
The book starts with a review of SQL Servers history, from its first association with Microsoft to the complete assumption of development of the product by Microsoft. The great bet taken with SQL Server 7.0 completely re-architecting the product from the ground up) is documented, as well as the change in philosophy that occurred with that release. Finally, the author provides an explanation of why this product started out as SQL Server 7.5 and why its now SQL Server 2000.
The details of the SQL Server architecture in Chapter 3 justify the purchase of this book. Some of the details are merely nice to know (if youre a hard-core database internals person), others are the sort of internals information that comes in very, very handy for detailed capacity planning and performance work.
The information in Chapter 6 about the table structures complements the information in Chapter 3 and completes the information you need for planning and sizing efforts.
Chapter 10 covers information on solving practical problems with transact-SQL. Chapter 11 explains batches (a topic that is often not well understood by customers), as well as stored procedures and functions.
The internals information that most folks thirst for is for performance tuning and optimization. Youll find this (surprisingly enough) in Part 4, Performance and Locking. The author presents detailed information about the internals and mechanisms for the lock manager and the query optimizer. Chapter 16 is all about query tuning and how to optimize your queries. It also explains how to resolve deadlocking problems.
Overall, this book is a good purchase and worth the price. Its important that you do note the change in focus of this book, if you are a purchaser of a previous edition of the book. The details that youre looking for are still there, but youll also find additional information that wasnt there in previous releases and that you may perceive to be somewhat basic. Dont let that prevent you from getting the valuable nuggets of information from this book.
Author: Kalen Delaney
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Published: November 2000
ISBN: 07356099985
1104 pages
$59.99