Customer Reviews

The Guru's Guide to SQL Server Architecture and Internals

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I have been working RDBMS for more than 10 years and with SQL Server for more than 5 years. I have not seen a book in SQL server which explains exactly how internals of SQL Server is implemented. There are lots of SQL books out there which are nothing but the repeat of SQL books online. This books stand out from the crowd. First 400 pages of the book talks about the windows OS, which crucial to understand SQL Server internals since the database engine lot of OS features. I like this author's straightforward style and the sample programs are excellent in demonstrating the concepts. I would strongly recommend this book for anybody interested in understanding SQL Server beyond its syntax. I wish I had an opportunity to study this kind of book few years back.

This is one of the best books that I have read so far on Windows and SQL Server. It gives the user a good understanding of some of the basic windows concept that are so fundamental to SQL Server internal workings.

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Ken's latest Guru's Guide is an important book for SQL Server Professionals who build or manage SQL Server systems.

SQL Server is tightly integrated with Windows, so understanding how SQL Server uses Windows services is essential to managing it effectively. This book covers the important Windows / SQL Server topics in significant depth, exploring each one from both a pure Windows perspective and then how it relates to SQL Server.

The first half of the book is dedicated to covering technical Windows concepts such as I/O, Memory, Thread scheduling, Synchronisation & Sockets as well as covering how SQL Server uses each of these. The second half of the book explores various SQL Server features in the depth you'd expect one of Ken's Guru's Guides.

This is not a beginners' book. It will feel at home on your shelf if you're reading books such as "Inside SQL Server" (another excellent SQL book) or "Inside Windows", both MS Press. These are all technically deep references for SQL people which offer real answers to the problems & issues we face in working with SQL Server & Windows. Many other books simply skim the edges of the technical topics that this book covers in depth.

If you're trying to learn how to write simple SQL statements, this is not the book for you. If you need or want to understand how SQL Server works inside & interoperates with the Windows environment, this is an excellent guide & reference.

Don't let the 1000 pages deter you. Some of the chapters are likely to be considered too in-depth, but the book is loaded with so much info that you're sure to find something that makes it a worthwhile purchase. The material is presented well and the kiddy stuff is skipped so you're not wasting time flipping through material you've known for the last few years. I like the inclusion of the MS Debugger. The examples in the book have given me an introduction to it, and in time I expect that it will come in handy. In my years of reading SQL Server books, few have been as comprehensive as this one. It goes somewhat beyond Inside SQL Server, though I have not purchased that book since SQL 7. This is the type of book from which certification questions should be derived. It describes the nuances in using SQL Server and I've enjoyed reading several chapters of this book highlighting along the way. I consider it a better reference than SQL Server 2000 Resource Kit, and my only complaint is that it doesn't include other important subject areas such as security and hacking. Those areas are addressed in other references like SQL Server Security by Andrews, Litchfield, and Grindlay which I've got ready to read as soon as time permits.

Microsoft's SQL Server does not have all the functionality of Oracle or IBM's databases. But Microsoft has put a huge amount of work into beefing it up, as shown in this book. Henderson has done far more than just write a straightforward guide to the query syntax. In fact, the latter is not the emphasis here. Rather, he explains how SQL Server integrates into the Microsoft operating system, for one thing. Like memory mapped files, WinSock and network connections, and how they relate to SQL Server. He provides a long discussion of its memory management; crucial if you are heavily loading up the database. With queries and table joins, you get help on how to optimise, based on knowledge of SQL Server's innards.

At over 900 pages, the breadth might seem daunting. But it reflects the complexity and potential of SQL Server.

Henderson also provides some nice extra touches. Each chapter ends in a quick list of review questions, to see if you have been paying attention. Plus, at the book's end, he has 2 essays. One is on the drivel that constitutes most [all?] management fads. The second is on pseudo experts in newsgroups. The entire book is worth it, just for these essays! Very biting.

Ken Henderson is the premier author of SQL Server and has created his best work yet of his series "Gurus Guide.." with this book. This book digs in to the nuts and bolts of SQL Server like no other author has to date. I have had the honor of meeting him on a few occasions and listenting to two of his presentations - each time I run back to apply my newly acquired skills. We are lucky to have a great programmer, thinker, SQL Server wiz continuously exploring the application so that we might be better dba's and programmers ourselves.

Thanks again, Ken
Lee

Alas, this book was a VERY disappointing reading.

Its one of the biggest sins is having a misleading title. "SQL Server Architecture and Internals" ? Forget it.

The first whole third of the book is Win32 in a nutshell. It tells you about memory, processes, I/O and everything. But I already have my Richter dog-eared all right, I wouldn't need a reminder in a book on SQL Server.

Then, about the SQL Server. Internals ? What a joke. The only internals that you would find are names of the DLLs where this or that SQL Server subsystem resides and a few hardcore debugger sessions to show you those DLLs actually get loaded. Uh-huh, thanks.

Can you imagine a book on SQL Server internals which doesn't mention pages and/or extents ? In-depth description of different execution plans ? This is the one.

What this book really is, is 20 chapters worth of overviews for more or less known SQL Server features. Average-to-good overviews of a less known features. Uhm, architecture, internals ? Nope - SQLXML, DTS, notification services, cursors, transactions. Take cursors - it says there are four types of cursors, you know, static, etc. and shows an SQL snippet for each. That's basically it. Take transactions - ACID, isolation levels and usage hints. Oh well, it could be worse...

Difficult to say without reading other books by the same author (not that I have an urge any more), but it appears he has written a whole series of them. You find sentences like "In my other book..." all over the place. Just love it:

[quote]
I must confess that I was conflicted when I sat down to write this chapter. I wrestled with whether to update the SQLXML coverage in my last book, which was more focused on the practical application of SQLXML but which I felt really needed updating, or to write something completely new on just the architectural aspects of SQLXML, with little or no discussion of how to apply them in practice. Ultimately, I decided to do both things.
[/quote]

Isn't it great ?

Oh, the chapter on Full-Text Search was hilarious. How about this:

[quote]
Communication between SQL Server and Microsoft Search occurs via a full-text provider. This provider resides in SQLFTQRY.DLL in the binn folder under your default SQL Server installation.
...
The sp_fulltext_... system procedures interact with it via the undocumented DBCC CALLFULLTEXT command
...
Table 16.1. DBCC CALLFULLTEXT Functions
[*** A TABLE OF FUNCTION IDS TAKING THE ENTIRE PAGE ***]
...
As a rule, you shouldn't call DBCC CALLFULLTEXT in your own code. The function IDs and parameters listed above could change between releases
[/quote]

What a heck did I just learn ???

I thought this book would show me how to improve the performance of the applications that I write by knowing the database server architecture deeper. Instead, I got a book of not so bad overviews of different things for which there either was no coverage in the previous books or the author thought a quick reminder would be nice.

To be fair, some of the discussions were reasonably interesting, like chapter 12 "Query Processor", but give me a break, it's like 40 pages in a 1000 pages book.

Don't.

What can I say: this guy starts a SQL Server book on explaining you how Windows kernel works and spends an entire chapter on the memory management mechanism (throwing some C/C++ and Assembly here ad there)!
I bet some Microsoft folk will be using this too...
He already wrote an excellent one, but I definitely didn't expect this much onthis edition.
Great.

Bar none, no one knows more about SQL Server than Mr. Henderson. This book goes into more subjects at a finer detail than any other SQL Server book ever written. It's kind of humbling, and I think most SQL Server DBA's & programmmers need that. :)

(...)This book is a large font book with very general information and the insightful parts or the massive amounts of code [...]is not usable, for the most part, on a production system. The vb.net code taking up a full chapter on notification services for example is a take of from the visual studio.net help files except the example code is not usable. Why the author chose his audience would better learn from something that can't be used is beyond me. The first chapter is nothing but the table of contents usually found in most books before chapter one. There is MASSIVE amounts of duplication from the first two books in here. If you don't mind having hundreds of pages of duplication from the first two books, it may be an ok book for you to learn basic concepts from but it doesn't teach any real world practices. Not in the sense of useful information for a developer working in SQL on production code. There are many other titles that don't spend 4 pages at the beginning of each chapter espousing the author's virtues and simple reasons for writing it this way or that. Each chapter being different from the other. One chapter will tell you that you must learn and just giving examples is a bad idea, other chapters will tell you that examples of usage are the way to go. The author is easily swayed in his ideology by those of persuasive pennings, as is evidenced by his changes in philosphy over the three books and the flip flop and contrary statements throughout the book anyone who reads closely will see time after time.

Also some of the code loads at boot and spybot search and destroy picks up it immediately. I'm not sure why sequin needs a memory resident piece running at all times using up valuable resources. That is not acceptable from book code, esp. a query analyzer of dubious worth. The other code in this book is looked upon suspiciously by award winning security software. Anytime I find a macro or code written in this manner I'm very leary of allowing it to run simply because it may not be written well enough not to accidently trash my system. I'm not saying any intentional malicious code is on this CD. Not at all, just not written well enough to pass muster with good security products.

thank you.