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43 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The bible of SQL Server 2000, December 4, 2000
This review is from: Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (Paperback)
Before Inside SQL Server 2000 came out, my favorite technical book on earth was Inside SQL Server 7. Up until today, there was no other book that I consulted with as much as I did with Inside 7. My copy is already in a very bad shape from overuse. I often consult with it whenever I am in doubt on any issue concerning SQL Server internals. I sometimes read from it to my students in class to prove a point. I had many expectations from inside SQL Server 2000 and I eagerly read every word in it. The book exceeded my expectations! Before it came out, I thought that it would have the same level of detail that Inside 7 had with additional discussions on SQL Server 2000s new features, but it goes far beyond that. In many areas it goes into smaller details than Inside 7 did discussing issues that I have never seen discussed in any other book or published document. For example, in the chapter about indexes DBCC PAGE is used extensively to actually traverse the B-Trees and examine the actual layout of the data in the index pages. By examining those, a lot of the points concerning the interesting index architecture that SQL Server uses become clearer. By getting to this level of detail, I feel that I have more adequate tools to make the right critical decisions in a system regarding which columns to index; on which column(s) to create the clustered index; space consumption of indexes on huge tables, and so on. The chapter also covers the new indexes on views and on computed columns. The chapter on locking discusses the locking architecture and the lock manager in detail but it also discusses internal lock structures such as Lock Blocks and Lock Owner Blocks in great depth. There is simply no way to get that information in any other source. Many internals related areas get more attention in Inside 2000 such as the storage engine and the relational engine. The query processor has a whole chapter of its own! The installation process is covered in great detail covering all the installation options, some of which are totally new, such as multi instances. It also covers hardware considerations such as RAID controllers, file system, memory and so on. The chapter on tables discusses internal page and row structures explaining every bit inside the row. T-SQL is not neglected either. Beyond programmatic aspects, Inside 2000 gets into the various internals and optimization aspects of the various constructs and handles query and performance tuning in depth. Among the topics that are covered are joins, subqueries, derived tables, user defined functions, stored procedures, transactions, referential integrity including the new cascading referential constraints, after and instead of triggers, views, cursors, large objects and more. Full-Text searching has a whole new section. Tough areas such as plan caching; auto parameterization and reuse of execution plans are also explained in detail. Join algorithms including nested loops, hash and merge are also explained. The coverage of data modification internals is outstanding! It includes coverage of page splits; the various internal update mechanisms such as in-place and non in-place updates; bulk inserts optimization and more. All these were just examples. The book is very rich in the areas that it covers and it is definitely a must for programmers and DBAs that really want to know their stuff as far as SQL Server is concerned. The book is a work of art.
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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Decent book, SQL Server 2000 coverage lacking, February 28, 2001
This review is from: Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (Paperback)
This book is the same decent book the version 7 book was. That's really the problem -- they're too similar. As some of the other reviews have pointed out, you won't find coverage of XML in this book. Should you expect to? Well, I guess that's debatable. Me, I expected it and was really disappointed when I couldn't find anything on it at all. That said, there's still useful info here. Most of the internals between 7.0 and 2K didn't change much, so the book still applies. Some of the same errors that existed in the 7.0 book are still here, but, mostly, the book gets it right. I guess the final verdict is: if you already own the 7.0 book, don't waste your money. If you don't have the 7.0 book, this book is probably worth reading through.
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43 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
OK, but could be a lot better, January 17, 2001
This review is from: Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (Paperback)
I read the previous version of this book and thought it was pretty good. It was a valuable resource when I was learning all I could about SQL Server for the first time. As I said in my review of that book, I felt the book belonged on every SQL Server DBA's bookshelf. This book repeats much more of the version 7 book than I'd like. If it didn't claim to be a SQL Server 2000 book, I suppose that would be OK. To me the 2000 book should have a lot more 2000 specific stuff than it does. It really seems like this is just the version 7 book with a few additions. For example, I would like to have seen info on how the releases differ, but so far I haven't found it. I would like to have seen info on SQL Server's new XML support, but it's not there.... This doesn't mean that the book isn't useful or that the info is bad, just that it doesn't reach its full potential. The conclusion I came to on this book is simply that the book is still pretty good, but could have been so much better Bob S.
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