Customer Reviews

The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL

5 star:		(202)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Ah, where to begin. This book is a masterpiece. It is over the top. It distills, in one volume, all that's worth knowing about advanced Transact-SQL. If you've read the Books Online, this book is a natural next step in your T-SQL education. It took me from a rank amateur to an advanced coder within days. It gave me insights into new ways of coding that I'd never have thought of on my own. It showed me how to work in harmony with T-SQL and SQL Server, rather than try to get them to do things they weren't designed to do.

The best chapters, are, IMHO, these:
- DML Insights
- DDL Insights
- The Mighty SELECT
- Statistical Functions
- Transactions
- Cursors
- Sets
- Arrays
- Stored Procedures and Triggers
- T-SQL Performance Tuning
- Administrative T-SQL
- OLE Automation
- Undocumented T-SQL

There's so much good info in this book, it's hard to pick a list of the "best chapters." To be sure, there's not a weak chapter in the book, and you should read every last one of them.

[...] This book is a must-read for anyone serious about coding in Transact-SQL.

Because it was called a "Guru's Guide" I didn't know whether this book expected me to already be a guru or whether it was claiming that it was written by one. Luckily for me, it was the latter.

Myself, I'm relatively new to Transact-SQL. When I got this book, I very much considered myself a beginner. I'd only begun working in T-SQL about a year and a half ago.

I can honestly say that this book was so full of great information that I began moving to the next level almost immediately. The author pulls no punches and delivers on his committment to avoid filler material throughout. This is a dense, gem-packed treatise on the language that belongs in the library of every would-be Transact-SQL expert.

Favorite parts:

- Cursor chapter (the story of the ill-fated SQL Server conversion is priceless -- I have been there, I have been there...)

- Performance & Tuning chapter (could be a book unto itself)

- Undocumented T-SQL chapter (because I like hidden goodies)

- Preface (because it's honest)

If you want to be a Transact-SQL coder or DBA worth your money, get this book and learn its many secrets inside out.

I bought this book not knowing what to expect. The title seemed a little pretentious to me. Well, I was wrong. This is a _great_ book -- one of the best computer books I've ever read. The coverage of Transact-SQL is so deep that I seem to glean something new each time I pick up the book. I've been working with MS SQL since 4.2, and I thought I knew all the in's and out's of the language. I was wrong about that, too. The book showed me just how little I knew.

The chapter on undocumented T-SQL alone is worth the cost of the book and taught me loads I didn't know. All those hidden DBCCs, trace flags, and undocumented stored procedures were fun to discover and will definitely come in handy. Without reservation, I can recommend this book to anyone looking for the ultimate tome on SQL Server's Transact-SQL.

I loved this book. I've already ordered several more copies to use with the classes I teach. Henderson is practical, scholarly, thorough, and often quite funny. The quotes that begin each chapter are insightful as well as humorous and give us some insight into who the man behind the book is. I like technical books that I can connect to on a personal level.

As for technical merits, you will have to look very hard for a better T-SQL book. I have most of the T-SQL books out there and the Guru's Guide beats them hands down. Henderson includes everything but the kitchen sink without being overwrought. I especially like the chapters on cursors and transactions. I never really understood the fine details of transactions until I read this book. Also very handy was the chapter on full text searches via T-SQL. I'd always wanted to know how to use this powerful facility in my own code, but had never really delved into how to go about it. The Guru's Guide makes it easy.

Lastly, I really liked the free T-SQL programming environment the author included. It's apparently one he wrote himself (!) It beats the pants off Query Analyzer, runs faster, and has features we could only dream of in QA (block indention, comment spell check, scripting, keyboard macros, etc., etc.). My team and I have switched to it as our main T-SQL development environment and have realized some real productivity gains in doing so. The author could easily sell this package and make real money from it. If you want a great book and a tremendous CD value, get the Guru's Guide.

What really sets this book apart from the other SQL Server books I have is the attention to detail. There is no stone left unturned in terms of the language -- it's many quirks, nuances, and hidden features. From a collection of sprocs that implement better soundex routines than SOUNDEX(), to the gory details of cursors and transactions, to over a hundred undocumented routines/features of the language, this book has it all.

I spoke with the author at a conference this past weekend and asked whether any of the techniques he mentioned in his speeches were also in his book. When he told me all of them were, I went out and purchased the book immediately. Holy Toledo!! The book is an expert's catalog of all that's worth knowing about Transact-SQL! I was blown away by all the code. I've never seen a programming book of any kind with so many examples, let alone a database programming book.

I've learned so many new techniques with this book. For example, I had no idea you could perform OLE Automation with Transact-SQL. The sp_GenerateSQL procedure is a real gem -- it uses Automation to control SQL Server's SQL-DMO interface and basically do anything Enterprise Manager can do (all from T-SQL!). I now use this procedure anytime I need to generate an SQL script for an object -- no need to fire up EM.

The row-positioning queries are priceless too. Who knew you could compute the median of a distribution set of any size with just a few lines of T-SQL? Who knew how to perform complex operations results with T-SQL? I had no idea.

Last by not least, the Undocumented T-SQL chapter is worthy of its own book. It uncovers all sorts of hidden stored procedures, functions, trace flags and the like to give you access to the same tools the SQL Server developers themselves use. I love it.

Bottom line: this is a wonderfully practical and comprehensive guide to the language, written by a T-SQL guru for those who would become T-SQL gurus themselves.

This was written for SQL Server 2000. I have been working with SQL Server for over 10 years. This book is filled with handy, clear, interesting SQL code. I have found several techniques that I use every day. I enjoy the style and the absence of screen shots of the query editor.
Mr. Henderson explains clearly why the code is written and when you would write the SQL statements.
I recommend this book for anyone with some experience in SQL and some frustration with SQL Server.

I just made the transistion from Oracle to SQL
Server about 3 months ago and I took up this book for a
starting point on the power of SQL Server. This book
is a great book for me and anyone making this kind of transition.

I am a SQL Server trainer based in New York. We buy all the books that come out on SQL Server and evaluate them for classroom use. This book is hands-down the best book money can buy on Transact-SQL and maybe even on SQL Server. My take on the other Transact-SQL books:

Teach Yourself Transact-SQL (both versions) - too shallow and too disorganized to teach you anything in 21 months, let alone 21 days

Transact-SQL (Amo) - nearly everything in it is in the Books Online. It is also quite dated.

Transact-SQL Programming (Klein, et al) - Very dated (SQL Server 2000 is not covered at all and SQL Server 7.0 is relegated to an appendix) and gets off into topics that have nothing to do with Transact-SQL (for example, the bcp utility). It was unfortunately the best of the lot until the Guru's Guide came out.

Advanced Transact-SQL Programming (Moreau, et al) - Not advanced at all - really just a rehash of the Books Online. Examples have numerous flaws. Recommends techniques that MS has deprecated. Book is a difficult read because of obvious problems with English on the part of the authors.

SQL for Smarties (Celko) - not a Transact-SQL book, per se, but we looked at using it to teach ANSI-compliant Transact-SQL since it purports to teach ANSI syntax. The problem with it is that 1) the examples are loaded with errors 2) many of the examples (and recommendations) come straight from academia - they aren't applicable to the real world. People who come to us for training usually want to learn something that will help them do their jobs better. This book doesn't really do that.

So, there you have it: our brief survey of the available Transact-SQL books. Given the competition, Henderson's book easily walks away as the best Transact-SQL book your money can buy. It is practical, well-written, and loaded with great examples and good advice. The parts we use most are:

Cursors chapter - shows how to properly use cursors to solve complex problems.

Concurrency chapter - shows how to design Transact-SQL code to deal with locking/blocking/concurrency issues. Explains locking in detail and explains how to use it to your advantage.

SELECT chapter - all you ever wanted to know about SELECT and more.

Statistics chapters - these gems show how to solve hard row-positioning problems with Transact-SQL code that will actually work in the real world.

Administrative chapter - most of our students are DBAs who want to know how to do their jobs better. This chapter not only includes lots of useful code that you can drop into place in production environments, it also reveals a lot about how SQL Server works internally. It's probably our most popular lesson.

Stored procedures - DBAs usually wind up writing a fair number of stored procedures, so this chapter has also proved very popular.

Performance and Tuning - this chapter could be its own book. It's crammed full of useful techniques for speeding up slow Transact-SQL code. It's my personal favorite.

Full-text search - Since its addition in SQL Server 7.0, this topic has garnered a lot of interest from our students. We've used Henderson's Full-Text chapter to teach FTS from soup to nuts.

In our opinion, this is the best Transact-SQL book money can buy. It's also the best SQL book of any kind out there - it's more useful than books like Celko's because the 600+ examples in it actually work :-) And it may even be the best SQL Server book around. Though we also like and use books like Inside SQL Server 2000 and various others from Microsoft, this book stands apart from them because of how well written it is. We've had students who weren't even SQL Server people comment on what an easy read the prose is.

The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL is exactly what its title implies: the definitive word on Transact-SQL written by a master of the language.

I've read every SQL Server book I could get my hands on and none compare to this one. The sheer clarity of the text, the ind-depth explanations, the friendly prose -- all combine to produce the best book available on SQL Server.

Equally as amazing is the usefulness of the sample code. I don't know about you, but sample code from most of the books I've found tends to be more academic than practical. In other words, though it helps explain some important point, it's not code you could or would use in the real wrold. That's not true with this book. Everything - from the fulltext search examples, to the Automation and Administrative code - is good stuff. I used lots of it in my job as-is. So, you get a double value here. You get a great book, and along with it, a great T-SQL code library. They ought to sell the CD separately.

Last but not least - I love the T-SQL editor that's included with the book. It's a freebie tool (they're not hawking a product here) that's much more powerful and easy to use than Query Analyzer. So, you get a triple value.

All told, this is one heckuva book (and software package). Knowing what I know now, if I was told I had to get rid of all my SQL Server books except one, this is the one I'd keep.

The best thing about this book is that it doesn't follow the example of most of the other SQL Server books out there -- it doesn't settle for merely repeating the Books Online. Instead, it fills in the details the BOL leaves out and provides expert advice that only a guru could.

I've been a certified SQL Server DBA since Microsoft first offered the certification, and I can say that this book is hands down the best T-SQL book around, as Joe Celko says in the book's Foreword. Beyond that, it's the best book I've seen on _any_ SQL dialect - Microsoft or otherwise.

The best parts of the book are the early chapters. The Data Types chapter, for example, provides an expansive tour through the many nuances of the SQL Server data types, including the new ones introduced by SQL Server 7.0. The new GUID type, for example, is covered in detail, and expert comparisons with other similar types are offered.

The Nulls chapter is also a gem. Most database writers avoid getting drawn into the sometimes philosophical debate over missing values. Henderson handles the subject adroitly and succinctly -- recommending a course of action without sounding religious.

The DDL Insights and DML Insights chapters are also quite good. The book could have stooped to merely regurgitating the BOL, but this book doesn't do that. So, instead of a 100 pages each on DML and DDL, with have two chapters of about ten pages a piece that focus on the things not mentioned by the BOL -- things only a guru would know.

The chapter titled The Mighty SELECT Statement is the crown jewel of the book. I was well aware of most of the things SELECT could do before I ever read this book, however, this book takes the subject to a new level. It exposes features and power even veterans like myself would normally miss. It showed me ways of making SELECT work for me that I'd never even dreamed of. I used one of the techniques it illustrates just yesterday and blew my coworkers away. Like many of the techniques in this book, that one tip alone was worth the price of the book.

All around, I'd say this is the best investment you can make with your SQL Server $$. If you want to know Transact-SQL like the gurus do, read this book and learn it inside out.