Customer Reviews

Knight's 24-Hour Trainer: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Most of the Wrox collection of books I have I would rate fairly high on the star scale. Knight's 24-hour trainer is not different in that assessment. The book purports itself as a beginner to productive user of SQL Server 2009 Integration Services in 24 hours.

That's a tall order given the nature and scope of Integration Servers. I have worked with various members of the SQL Dev team from time to time and they confide, that this seems to be the one area that developers lag in their knowledge. Which is a shame, because getting the data into and out of a database is one of the most critical tasks.

I approached reading the book with an open mind as I was, like others, limited in my knowledge and use of Integration Services. The book is well laid out starting out with discussing how Integration Services is structured. Following are a series of small focused lessons and exercises to take one through the key features and utilities within SSIS. This book will not make you the ultimate guru on SSIS, however it will as advertised:

1) Give you a solid understand of how SSIS is structured and operates
2) Provides you enough training to meet the 80/20 rule head-on making you productive while your reading the text.

I would strongly recommend the book to anyone that works with SQL Server

Knight's 24-Hour Trainer: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services (Knights 24 Hour Trainer)

I picked up this book when I needed a crash course in SSIS for a work project. While it does have some significant flaws, the book has many strong points, and in the balance I believe the strengths outweigh the weaknesses. I can't recall ever having read a book that is simultaneously so good overall yet so plagued with annoyances.

Strengths first:
* The book does a great job in the arrangement of its subjects. You can start knowing nothing about the subject, and in very little time you come out with a solid base of understanding. Also, the pacing is terrific: the stuff you'll do the most hands-on, day-to-day work with come first, with the lesser-used stuff coming later. Skimming is easy and worry-free: the book doesn't hide important bits of info within a morass of excess words, or in the middle of a handful of topics of little or no use/interest to the reader. Wrox's propensity for wordiness is thankfully absent here.
* The book can be completed in 24 hours of work. A far cry from the "Learn X in 24 Hours" books that were once so popular!
* Each lesson is just long enough, and the hands-on lessons are pertinent, focused, and otherwise implemented extremely well.
* The video lessons are reasonably helpful, once you get past their weankesses.

Now, the weaknesses:
* The book has many errata, few of which are noted on the book's website. And as of this writing, you can't submit errata on Wrox's website unless you are registered with Wrox... and the website's registration page is broken. And you can't submit a problem report about the registration page because you need to be registered in order to submit the problem report. Thankfully, most of the errata are easily overcome by most readers, and no error was so signifcant as to render the lesson unusable.
* The videos have some significant production issues. First, the resolution on the video is so poor that in many cases it's impossible to read any of the text shown in screen shots, even if you enlarge the video player. Second, the audio leaves much to be desired. The narrator of the first 25 or so lessons apparently had a head cold when he did the recording; his enunciation is awful and a few of his mispronunciations (such as saying "arrigit" for "aggregate") are jarring. The second narrator is better in that regard, but he speaks so quietly that you have to really jack up the volume of the playback -- at which point you can hear all the traffic that was passing by the office where the recording was done. These problems, combined with the clunky UI and ugly, dated graphics, make the DVD seem amateurish.

So, would I recommend this book? Yes, very much so. The text and the approach of the book are so good that they overcome the problems posed by the DVD, and in the end, the book delivers admirably on its promise.

I hadn't heard of SSIS until the week before I bought this book. This book gave me a broad overview with enough depth to get started. Now I'm using the software for actual work. Very worthwhile.

Couple of notes:
1) Not for SQL Server Express
2) Are you old-school? SSIS is the new Data Transformation Services
3) The book is for MS SQL 2008. I'm using 2005, and could follow along easily. Minor differences.

On another note, all computer books should have video. I can't tell you how helpful that was. They didn't spend a lot of time or money making the video. They just had something running that recorded their screen actions and voice, and let them zoom in. Then they basically just showed on screen what they were talking about in the book. It looks like they spent five or ten minutes per chapter. They make it look so easy, that from now on I'm going to consider anyone who doesn't include a video in a computer book to be lazy. In other words, they raised the bar. Authors, this is the new standard. It doesn't have to be expensive to be effective. Not perfect, just useful.

Knight's book is a great introduction to SSIS having beginners up and running in no time. The lessons are straightforward and just as comprehensive as most 3 or 4 day training courses that run a grand or more.

I love this book. It is a great training tool. I am new to Microsoft SQL Server so it has become my Bible. The lessons at the end of each chapter are great for beginners. Plus you get it all on a DVD. Thanks guys for such great information provided with simplicity.

I've been a database administrator for so long that I (like many others) sort of got stuck in the rut of using the "old" ways (DTS - 2000 or T-SQL scripts) for my ETL processing. Upon thumbing through this book, it seemed like it would be easy to learn the "new" ways of performing DTS tasks. So, I thought what the heck...It's time for a change. I bought the book and let me tell you, it is such a great book and I am so glad that I bought it! The old way seems so archaic to me now! Brian, Devin and Mike have combined a great textbook with great learning videos as well. This is a great book for those looking to break into learning SSIS.

A sincere thank you to Brian, Devin and Mike for such a great tool that I will use for years to come.

This book is a great way to learn how to learn SSIS in a hurry. I think it is also a template for the how-to book of the future. Watching video conveys much more information per second than reading text. It would take many pages of "select this, right-click that", etc to illustrate the usage of some feature. Video/audio conveys this in a second or two.

The compact text in this book is mainly used to explain concepts and details that are not easily conveyed by vidoo. The intelligent pairing of text and video is a very efficient way to learn. 'Intelligent' is the key word here. Knight uses video where it is appropriate and does not bloat the text with redundant instructions. I find it a nice balance. I can generally complete the exercises after watching the video without reading the text. However, I can see that I would miss many important points if I did not also read the text.

This book is sitting on the desk in front of me. It is about three-quarters of an inch thick, including DVD. It has 49 lessons with accompanying video covering the whole subject of SSIS in about 350 printed pages. Beside it I have another very good how-to book, Murach's 'C# 2008'. It is an inch and three-quarters thick. It too covers its subject thoroughly, but takes almost 800 pages to do so.

I realize this is not a completely fair comparison because the subjects of the two books are quite different. However I can't help but think that my introduction to C# might have taken significantly less time if the text had been integrated with video as has been done in Knight's book.

Recently I had to pick up SSIS, and was doing some basic packages. This book gave me an overview of some of the common features, and helped in making some of the more common concepts more dynamic.

If you need a quick overview book that helps generate some ideas for over coming problems, then I recommend this book. If you already have years of experience in SSIS by having SQL build packages for you, but have never explored the tools this is going to be a good book. If you are above beginner and have used Studio for your packages designs, you need a better tool then this book.

So for me this book gets 5 stars, because it gave me exactly what I needed, a starting place to let my imagination run wild.

Below are the top chapters in this book for me, not that the earlier chapters are not helpful also in explaining the tools, but starting at Section 4, my package designs changed completely.

Section IV: variables and Expressions
- This is something that is that is really simple now, but when first starting out I didn't use at all

Section V: Containers

Section VI: Configuration
- Configuring Child Packages, combine this with the variables chapter has change shorten the number of packages that I build. fewer packages = less trouble maintaining them.

section VII: Troubleshooting and Logging
- The basic building blocks to tracking problems. If you build fewer packages, you have more complex packages. This chapter helped in getting the basic down on creating a bug tracker.

In programming just knowing what someone is talking about opens up more ideas to explore with. I recommend combining this book with more advance books, web blogs, and MSN help files.

On a side note, I have people in the office look at the packages I'm building now and say "I didn't know you could do that."

Next step - custom controls so that I can build things faster.

This book is intended for Microsoft SQL Server database administrators who are not yet familiar with SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). You should have enough understanding to be able to run queries manipulating data. This is a beginner level book so far as SSIS is concerned. As such it doesn't cover every little detail but by the end of the book you will have enough information to use SSIS and to get out of the SSIS documentation what you need to know.

The book has a style that I've not seen before. As a book it is rather typical in format beginning with installation and getting started then going on with a series of chapters describing how to use particular features of the software.

After that, however, it gets more interesting. The book includes a DVD that has a presentation that goes with each chapter. The idea is that you read the book then listen to the presentation. That way you get a concise review of what you should have picked up in the chapter. The reviews are given by the three authors of the book, so the presenter clearly understands the points he is discussion.

I suppose though that you could watch the presentation first and then read the chapter for the details.

There is also a web site associated with the book that provides things like the code that you can download rather than having to type in everything in the lesson.

This review comes from someone who has done a lot of DTS, but barely anything with SSIS. I've been working with SQL Server for quite a few years but haven't been tasked with ETL in about 3 years. Suddenly, I have to know how to use 2008's SSIS by next week. The book is laid out in very simple discreet chunks that teach you one simple thing at a time. I'm about 1/3 through the book on the first day (Friday) and have been looking ahead. This book makes SSIS very easy and I'm quite confident that I will have everything I need by Sunday. I would highly recommend this book to anybody that has been putting off learning SSIS but really has a need/desire to eventually do it. Use this book and you'll have nothing to worry about.

Between the textual layout and the videos I think anyone with the ambition to master SSIS can start with this book and build the basic skills and confidence to get a jump on the game. The aim of this text is to get you to the point where you can be productive in a software development (ETL) role. The rest will follow using SQL Server BOL and other more advanced books and ref materials to build on the foundation of skills this book provides.

Hopefully this book will serve as a master for teaching format and other video accompanied texts like this one will emerge in the market. Highly recommend.