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Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Review by Dmitry Dvoinikov
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.