by Kalen Delaney
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Product Description
Take an in-depth look at the internals of the SQL Server Storage Engine with advice from a popular author and SQL Server expert. Database developers and administrators get best practices, pragmatic advice, and code samples to help master the intricacies of creating and maintaining enterprise relational databases. Discover how to: Upgrade or migrate to SQL Server 2005 and choose configuration options Control space allocation for databases and files manually or automatically Manage transaction logs to maximize efficient restore operations and data consistency Observe the internal structures of clustered and nonclustered indexes Build and partition relational indexes and tables Explore internal storage issues and compare fixed- and variable-length datatypes Detect and correct index fragmentation Implement and manage an appropriate concurrency model using locking or row versioning PLUS Get code samples on the Web
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Best SQL Server internals book on the market, 2008-08-07
This is NOT a book to learn about SQL Server programming. This is for the advanced student of database programming or optimization. Did you ever want to know how SQL Server writes the indexes to disk? How many bytes does that row actually take in memory? Those are the types of questions you can ask in this book and get incredibly detailed answers.
The section on index creation alone is fantastic. You will not find this level of detail in college books on database design and thoery.
I think this is honestly the book I have read from a company that gives so much of their internal information. The format of the disk files, how things happen and why are all included. The writing style is clear without being wordy. She has a lot to tell you and gets about her business. The examples are usually small and to the point.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Less signal more noise, 2008-08-05
I have attempted to read this book atleast 4 times in the last year. A couple of times I tried reading cover to cover. Other times I jumped into specific chapters. Neither approach worked for me.
I realized the reason is that the book's presentation is very confusing (atleast for me). There are a lot of contents in the book that can be found easily. For example chapter 6 starts with a primer on relational database which is not the goal of the book. Also I found the complete catalog of data types a bit redundant since it can be got from online. Again these only examples. The book is fraught with such redundant material that makes the signal to noise ratio very low.
I expected the book to contain the stuff that cannot be found else where (Sort of like Windows Internal by Mark Russonovich). May be the problem is my expectation. I loved "Database Tuning" by Dennis Shasha et al.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Fantastic, 2008-01-06
Okay, reviewing this book is going to be quite difficult. I have mixed feelings however everything that I have to say about this book is positive. For one, this is not for the faint of heart of casual reading. This book is there for those who want to learn the gory details of how SQL 2005 works.
I would describe the book like this:
You have a car and it is nice and pretty on the outside, and you can do all sorts of cool things with the buttons on the console and you can play music and other nifty things, such as GPS. Well, on the inside of the car you have no clue how it all ties together and what is going on when you push that button.
Well, imagine this book as a blueprint of how your car's innards work, down to the very last oil spot on the engine.
This book is the best down right down to the memory block detailed book I have seen on SQL 2005. Now, the hard part about this book is that it can be difficult to read, and follow, at times. There are several sections you may have to read over and over again just to start to understand what it even means.
If you are looking for a good hard core book on the SQL engine, this is it for you. I give this book a 5 star rating for content, author knowledge and sheer impressive information.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
 Technically advanced but sometimes incomprehensible, 2007-10-02
This book is perhaps the best book out there for understanding SQL 2005 architecture. I know of no other book which offers such advanced understanding of how SQL 2005 stores, retrives, and manages data.
Indeed, the author is a MS SQL MVP and has written with collaboration of those who have wrote the code for MS SQL 2005 at Microsoft.
The author's explaination, however, could be a lot better. For example, here is an exerpt on the author's explaination of IAM (Index Allocation Map):
"An IAM page contains a page header; an IAM page header, which contains eight page pointer slots; and a set of bits that map a range of extents on a file, which doesn't neccessarily have to be the same file that IAM page is in. The header has address of first extent in the range mapped by the IAM. The eight page pointer slots might contain pointers to pages belonging to the relevant object contained in mixed extents; only the first IAM for an object has values in these pointers."
Now, I have worked with databases for over a decade and have good understanding of Indexes and its structure, and I still did not understand what the author was talking about on some sentences.
Pros:
1)Explains data and index storage structures (Page, extents, B-Tree, Keys etc) and how they are managed in transactions (update, delete, insert) better than any book I know.
2)Relatively short book (400 pages) which does not waste words or sentences to make it a thicker book (common practice to write a thicker book for a higher price).
Cons:
1)Tries to combine MS SQL 101 topics (What is Master, MSDB, TEMP, and MODEL db?) with expert subject matter (What is IAM, Cluster Keys, RID, etc).
2)Writing is sometimes indecipherable.
3)Mostly not for the beginners (despite its rudimentrary coverage of the basics).
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A valuable addition to the 'Inside SQL' series, 2007-08-01
I've been following this series since the days of Ron Soukup, and Delaney once again does not fail to deliver and impress in this latest edition.
This book is part of a four part volume set (the 4th still awaiting publication at the time of this review), which previous to this release was contained in one volume. This shows how much more information is being published on SQL Server 2005, and gives Delaney the opportunity to focus on select topics and go into far more detail when covering them.
This book contains a perfect balance of material appropriate for the topics being discussed: (configuring SQL Server, logical table and log structures, internal file structures and management, the many available locking mechanisms). For topics not relevant to content of this book, Delaney frequently refers to the other books within this series and in particular the book on query tuning and optimization she is still working on.
Having now read a few volumes on SQL 2005, I can confidently state that Delaney does not waste pages regurgitating material that's either unrelated or unnecessary to the topic being discussed, but instead I found her insights and knowledge transfer unique to this book and worth the time learning.
Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone seriously wanting to learn SQL Server 2005 at a higher than basic level. You will not be disappointed.
NB. My only negative on this book is that it begins with 3 pages of acknowledgements listing technical colleagues, editors, friends etc that helped refine the book to what it is, but just within the first few pages there is an "xxx" placeholder in the text that hasn't been updated, a reference to a companion CD that was dropped from publication plus other technically incorrect statements. In fact, there are so many editorial errors throughout the book that there is a significant page on www.insidesqlserver.com dedicated to documenting the corrections. All books contain errors, but it was just painful to see so many after reading through the myriad of people that helped "perfect" this book. On a positive note, kudos to the author for acknowledging the problems and publishing the corrections.
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