Inside Microsofta SQL Servera[ 2000 [With 1]

This book is very comprehensive and discusses, without wasting any space, what you should know if you want to call yourself expert in your role as a SQL Server DBA or even developer. You can find most of the information by using other Microsoft sources, mainly Books Online (BOL), but choosing between the two, I prefer the book thanks to it's pedagogical approach. It's also my first choice as a reference so I try to keep it within arms reach at all times.As others have claimed, the coverage of the new features in SQL Server 2000 isn't complete, but neither is coverage of the old features. This is just a matter of limited space and doesn't affect my rating of the book since it covers the most important stuff and does it really well. If you already own the SQL Server 7 version of this book, the 2000 version might not add much value to you though.SQL Server is a huge subject, not possible to cover completely in 1,000 pages. By the end of the book, the author has included a thorough list of suggested additional reading and he stresses the importance of also reading the SQL Server documentation, cover to cover.I found this book to be the best I've read about the inner workings of SQL Server 2000 and have enjoyed it together with Ken England's SQL Server 2000 Performance Optimization and Tuning Handbook which fills in some gaps for those performance-oriented.Brilliant as this book is, you still need to complement it with experience and Books Online to master SQL Server and all it's nitty-gritty details.

As someone who already has alot of experience with the product, it's very nice indeed to have a book that covers the internals as well as this book does. I guess it's important to understand that this is not a book for newcomers to SQL Server, nor is it a "how-to" book. This book is useful when you want to know what happens to your database when you perform an INSERT on a table with a clustered key. It tells you how the TEXT fields are stored, which allows a DBA to make an intelligent decision about when and if to use such a field. I obviously could go on and on. As far as I can tell, this is the *only* book out there that will give you that kind of information.Since this isn't a sequel or trilogy, I was expecting that there would be some redundancy between the 7.0 and 2000 version of the book simply because that same redundancy exists in the real product!If you are already an experienced DBA and are looking for an understanding of the internals so as to make better tuning decisions, then by all means,get this book. If you're new to SQL Server and you stiil don't know the difference between WHERE and HAVING, then you may be disappointed in this book, because it's not going to teach you how to use the EM and QA.

First of all, let me strongly disagree with low rates that some other reviewers gave to this book. I don't think it's correct to lower the rating just because the contents didn't change much since "Inside SQL Server 7". SQL Server 2000 is very much like SQL Server 7.0 (adding XML is the only major difference). It's a companion to the product, so it should be just a next iteration of "Inside SQL Server" series.Then it seems that some reviewers probably expected to find how to program SQL Server using ADO, XML, ODBC etc, and instead only found a description of internals. While I agree that the books should have covered XML implementation better, I'd remind that the title of the book is "INSIDE SQL Server"! And I was really pleased with how much of SQL Server internals were exposed to the general public.Perhaps I liked the book so much because I'm working now on a propriatary database implementation, and for me it was really useful to learn how SQL Server is implemented. But any serious database developer should understand how query execution is planned, how records are locked, and what is a performance and storage cost of certain operations. And all these topics are presented in a best possible way.

Let me start by saying I've read 3 books in this series (6.5, 7.0 & 2000). I've been a DBA for 5 years (2 years Oracle and now 3 years MS SQL Server).This book is a one-of-a-kind in the sea of SQL Server books available these days. It is targetted specifically at advanced developers and DBAs (and anybody else) who wants or needs to know the internals of SQL Server eg. How the SQL Server engine manages threads, memory, and on disk data structures.There have been a lot of reviews about what this book lacks but it is called "Inside SQL Server" not "EVERYTHING SQL Server". It's not about peripheral components like DTS, XML, replication and a vast array of other areas that SQL Server offers. It's also not about how to write SQL and it's not an Administration manual. At the risk of sounding repetitive (and a bit silly) it also won't teach you how to become a Day Trader or balance your checkbook and there's no discussion on the mechanics of Quantum Theory. If you buy this book hoping it will solve all of life's problems, I'm afraid, like many others (based on previous reviews), you'll be sadly disappointed.What it will show you is how SQL Server's Query Processor compiles and optimizes your SQL (good or bad). It will show you what the Lock Manager does and why. It will teach you how indexes and tables are stored on disk and how and why they are cached in memory. It discusses what fields are good candidates for indexing and when the Optimizer will use them. There's a chapter on efficient use of cursors and another on why stored procedures and batches are critical to good performance. There's much much more but at all times the focus is strictly on the core RDBMS.In closing I believe that this is an exceptional book, but it's not for everybody. If you're a developer (VB, c++, ...) who has to write some SQL as well then you're probably better off taking Kalen's own advice and reading "Advanced Transact-SQL for SQL Server 2000". After you read that (or something similar) and you need to get more performance, scalability, concurrency and/or consistency from SQL Server and know WHY you are getting it then this is "The [SQL Server] Bible".

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 coverag