Review: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Internals

Greetings! David Lean has a review of the recently published Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Internals , by Kalen Delaney, Paul S. Randal, Kimberly L. Tripp, Conor Cunningham, Adam Machanic, and Ben Nevarez, on his Dave does Data (Tutorials, Performance Tuning, Tips & Techniques on SQL Server & its ecosystem) blog.

Dave includes a helpful, personal chapter-by-chapter description. Here’s a sample:

Chapter 7: Special Storage

I’ve not seen this info elsewhere, covers new features of  LOB & Row Overflow, Filestream, Sparse Columns, Data Compression, Backup Compression & a small bit on Partitioning Storage. Nothing you couldn’t figure out with DBCC PAGE & a lot of time, but isn’t it nice you can quickly read it instead.

And here’s another snippet from his review:

This book is written by a team of authors. All are very talented. If you’ve been deep in SQL for a while you will notice a difference between the chapters. In some chapters you may think, “I figured that out myself, anyone with a strong knowledge of the once undocumented features like (DBCC PAGE, DBCC LOG) has probably explored to see what that does”. But a few of these chapters will have you thinking “How did they figure that out?”  At which point it will become clear that these guys are / were Product Managers on the SQL Engineering team. They didn’t just read the source code, they designed it that way. So some of the chapters give you the why it works the way it does & not just how it works.

Much thanks for the review, Dave. We’re glad you find the book useful!