Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Unleashed

I have read around 12 SQL books. If there is a highly rated SQL book, I probably read it. Along with "Microsoft SQL Server Performance Tuning and Optmization", this book is the best there is. This would be the book I will take with me if I had ended up in some isolated island with a SQL Server I had to manage. If you are some GUI button pushing SQL monkey, get this book fast and master its contents, only then you will become a real SQL DBA. One note, I also highly recommend "Inside SQL Server 2000" from Microsoft. But that book is not quite as comprehensive as this one.

I've spent quite a bit of time reading various SQL Server 2000 books at my local bookstore trying to evaluate which book I need. I'm a web application developer of content management systems, and custom web based tools and my primary systems are based on SQL2K. I wanted a book that covered as many of the topics that I needed information on, but at the same time went into enough detail to be useful. I mean you could get SQL 2000 High Availability which is like a 700 page book from Microsoft Press that talks nothing but high availability and nothing else. However I can't really justify spending on 4 or so books, and my job is not that of a DBA anyways.I'm very pleased with SQL Server 2000 Unleashed. It gives enough detail that I as a developer can take advantage of advanced features of MSSQL, understand more how the internals of MSSQL work which allows me to optimize my queries... and since I'm a one man team and have to take care of my database server, it provides best practices on maintenance, backup, indexing strategies, etc... I was also interested in learning more about high availability, what the options are, so that I can propose a solution and the options to my manager. My I.T dept was telling me to use Log Shipping for various reasons, a DBA from a sister company was recommending Fail Over Clustering for various reasons... I was bouncing back and forth on what to do, but after reading up on the high availability section in this book my questions were answered.Definitely an important read for those developing applications that use MSSQL for a DB, and an excellent reference for database administrators. Plus the wording isn't too dry.Hope that helps in your decision making. BTW the Microsoft Press book SQL SERVER 2000 HIGH AVAILABILITY is also an excellent book if you're a DBA and have to implement H.A in a large high transaction critical environment...

As somewhat of a newbie to Database Administration I have found this book to be extremely informative. The authors of this book have laid out the basic working structure of SQL Server 2000 in an easily understood way. I worked for a year with SQL 7 and have been studying and working with SQL Server 2000 for a year in a test lab environment learning how to use it. I passed 70-228 largely due to what I learned from this book. If you are looking for a how-to book that shows lots of screen shots and just exactly how to accomplish many of the GUI tasks associated with creating and maintaining SQL 2000 this book isn't for you, but if you want to understand how SQL Server 2000 works, well, this is an excellent book. If you learn conceptually, this is an excellent book. The authors have explained many of the conceptual workings of SQL Server 2000 and then shown examples of the concepts they have explained. I learn by understanding the concepts and then doing the hands on, so for me the way the authors presented the material is easily understandable. For someone who learns first by doing, and then slowly builds his/her understanding of the conceptual workings of the product this would not be a very good book.Someone else complained that there isn't a lot in this book about XML and the like, well, this book isn't about XML. XML is a separate subject, and this book would have been many hundreds of pages longer than it is now. No author, or authors, can cover every subject associated with a subject as large and as complex as SQL Server 2000. The book would be so large as to be be unusable.

I work as a Sql Server developer and DBA. SqlServer is a large application but because of the provided GUI is deceptively simple to get started with. However if your applications ever go into real production, then you (or someone in your organization) better become more than a beginner DBA. This book reads so easily and packs all the key info to become _proficient_ at administering (not application design/development-that is a different skill set) SqlServer. Concepts are balanced perfectly with keystrokes into well organzied and lucid explanations. The result is information that is easy to remember, because it is presented logically and succinctly. I am _very_ hard to please when it comes to tech books, but I would give this one 6 stars if I could. Especially useful in the move from 7.0 to 2000 version.

I recently inherited an over-due SQL Server 2000 upgrade project, which, it turned out, needed some serious rearchitecting of its data movement strategy. After struggling to find the information I needed in Microsoft's documentation and on Microsoft's tech support web site, I followed a colleague's recommendation and bought this book. The sections on DTS and replication not only laid out the answers I needed in easy-to-understand terms, but also provided examples that I was able to use right away (and learn a lot from!) I credit this book with saving my project!