Editorial Reviews:
This newly updated, official guide to the core architecture and internals of Microsoft SQL Server 2000 helps readers unlock the full power of Microsoft's premier relational database management system. Written by a renowned SQL Server guru, in conjunction with the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 product development team, INSIDE MICROSOFT SQL SERVER 2000 is a must-read for developers and IT professionals who need to understand Microsoft SQL Server from the inside out. This comprehensive guide provides updated, authoritative advice for installing, administering, and programming with SQL Server 2000. It also includes information about significant product enhancements, and new chapters about SQL Server Indexes and Query Optimization. The CD contains product evaluation documentation, sample code and scripts, white papers, and a benchmarking kit.
To help you design Microsoft database servers that must achieve the best possible performance, Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2000 has the details you need. For one thing, author Kalen Delaney (who used Ron Soukup's fantastic first edition as a starting point) explains how SQL Server 2000 works at a level that will interest all database administrators. She packs in the sort of minutiae that can make a real difference in the performance of especially large or complex data-storage structures, explaining what goes on inside the database management system (DBMS) when it's presented with various commands, and using that information to back up her abundant advice on the right way to design, build, and operate databases under SQL Server 2000. Delaney makes extensive use of DBCC PAGE dumps to show what's going on in the databases that demonstrate concepts (incidentally, that utility is documented, as well as the others in the DBCC toolbox). In a typical section, DBCC PAGE is used to show how index pages work. There's careful attention to database structure at the byte level too, with conceptual diagrams that explain how pointers work and how strings of strings of bytes combine to represent stored data. It's the sort of detail you need if you'll be writing software for SQL Server 2000, or need to extract maximum performance from the DBMS itself. --David Wall Topics covered: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 internals, especially data structures and the behavior of queries. Table design is emphasized, especially indexing decisions. Transact-SQL programming, including the use of cursors, gets lots of attention.
Customer Reviews:
Displaying 1 to 5 of 73 total reviews (Page 1 of 15):
 One big comprehensive book about SQL Server engine
This book is about SQL Server as of query and data access engine, not as of a whole product. It in fact covers the architecture of the SQL Server and its internals related to actually processing the data. This book indeed won't answer many practical HOW questions if any, instead it shows you the way SQL Server works on the inside so that you can apply this knowledge as you see fit.
It will tell you about data tables, indexes, constraints, locking, stored procedures, transactions, T-SQL language, cursors, full text indexes, deadlocks, query hints and so on. It won't tell you anything about how any of these are used in practice. Even the "Performance and Tuning" section wouldn't give a lot of practical advises.
Anyhow, this book is a great reading, if you are a experienced database developer, and by chance want to know
* how the data is stored inside the tables and indexes
* how the index pages are scanned when searching for data
* how memory manager handles its buffers
* how to read the SQL Server performance counters
* how a database is backed up and restored
* how different isolation levels affect locking
* how transactions can be shared between different connections
* how stored procedured, user-defined functions and triggers work
* how different types of cursors lock the records they traverse
* how to make your full text indexes work efficiently
* how to safely use text and image data
and so on. Do NOT read it, if you want to know
* how a particular table should be organized
* what indexes needs to be created in your case
* what's the right backup policy and how to set it up
* how to write any particular program in T-SQL
* anything with numbers in it, ex. performance evaluation
because it's not there. The book is about SQL Server internals. It's not a manual, not by any chance. It's on the theoretical side if you like. Upon reading this book I have actually said to myself "Hey, I know how it works ! I can tell !". Still I will have to answer different questions and come up with specific decisions in any of my future applications.
Although much of the information explained in this book I have already read somewhere else, this one book is worth many others. Why ? Because it's deep and extensive. Every topic is covered to its depth. This is probably the reason why this book has a mixed feeling to it after all. It feels like the amount of information the author had to cope with was so overwhelming that she had no time to add a plot to it.
Still, highly recommended reading for any SQL Server developer. Best for SQL Server internals
The best book I've seen. I've been working on SQL Server since 1997. Great for a technically inclined DBA or developer. Excellent Book by the master
I attended one of the seminars of the author and was thoroughly impressed by her knowledge on the matter and decided to buy her book. I am very pleased that I decided to do that. This is a very good book and a very good buy.
 Decent Surface Overview
I've been scouring this book and found that the there is well written overview of SQL, much like a whitepaper. You'll learn about the types of backup/recovery or replication, but you won't learn the how.
Given the "Inside" in the title, I was hoping this was more in depth and perhaps presented the "HOW". I would recommend this for the sales force for SQL Server or general casual reading, but not for people that want to actually do stuff and need to learn that.
I did like the history of SQL Server section, which I think is invaluable being a history buff, but I thought that it was unnecessarily defensive about Microsoft's business practices. One has to assume that if we are using the product, we are not openly hostile at Microsoft. Extremely useful and a pleasure to read.
What I love about this book is that it really shows you the full story of SQL Server, starting with a broad history of the product, and eventually delving down into the deep internals of the system.
I recently had to to deal with an old Sybase database, and found this book helpful, because Kalen's discussion of the internal storage and retrieval of data really applies across many database technologies. And of course, it has also proven invaluable for working with SQL Server too!
This book is directed to people who want to know what SQL Server can do and how to use it. No marketing hype here, just good solid material.
The only downside is the index, which for MS Press books, is in a too-large text, does not indent things well, and does not always group things in the most useful fashion. But this is not a fault of the author, and does not lessen the greateness of this book. More Customer Reviews:
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