Customer Reviews

SQL Server 2005 Distilled

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

 

 

A well organized analysis, useful for DBA's, developers and managers alike. Eric Brown neatly documents the strengths and usefulness of new features while explicitly identifying limitations and weaker components.

Excellent and thorough summary of the Business Intelligence component including Microsoft's interest in the future of this speciality. By far, my favorite section was "Random Thoughts on Deployment."

While the information does not drill down to the granular how-to-code level, sufficient information is contained to direct an interested developer down the path to more specific examples.

If you are an IT manager looking for an "Executive Summary" of the new features of SQL Server 2005, you will love this book! It gives you a nice overview of the new features, what they do, and suggestions for how you might apply them.

If your a programmer or a DBA looking for details and examples of how to do things in SQL Server 2005, you need to look elsewhere. My recommendation would be "Pro SQL Server 2005".

This book is perfect for the person who is not well versed in all the new features in SQL Server 2005 and wants to make an educated decision on which features to use for a given situation. I read the whole thing straight through to get my head around all the new stuff but I also noticed that it would be good for someone to just skim through to see if there is anything that would help with an immediate need. It's a lot easier to read this than some 1,000-page tome to decide which features will work for a project; then you can get the 1,000-page tome that focuses on the feature you really need.

Microsoft continually improves its SQL Server, and Brown shows how far it has come in the 2005 version. There has been a big push to make SQL Server 2005 industrial strength. So now it can do 1 million transactions per minute, up from 20 000 per minute in 2000. A remarkable gain that suggests Microsoft is making a strong drive into the bread and butter of DB2 and Oracle's customer bases. And, yes, the book comes out in 2006, while the Server is labelled 2005. But it's a very complex product [as the book makes clear], so some slippage was inevitable.

Other features covered by Brown include the High Availability, for businesses that need 365/24/7 coverage, or at least as close to this as possible.

A very interesting discussion takes place early in the text, where Brown suggests that more business logic needs to be embedded into the database layer, through such means as stored procedures, perhaps. In contradiction to the heavily promoted 3 tier arrangement, of database layer, application layer and presentation layer. Where the application layer holds the business logic. The idea is to separate the latter from depending on a particular choice of database. Brown disagrees. Saying that the performance gains often necessitate pushing the business logic into the database.

Maybe. Keep in mind however that every database vendor is likely to say this. Since a major [intended] effect is to lock the customer into that database. With this caveat, Brown might ultimately be correct. For the greatest performance, you may well have to do as the text suggests. Though whether you choose SQL Server or an alternative database is another matter.

This book is well written. I feel that it covers material that all managers need to know about SQL Server 2005. Programmers will be unhappy with it due to the lack of "how to" details, but that's not the purpose of this book. The size of the book is ideal for an airplane read.

Everybody loves the trees, but some of us need to look at the forest. This book is about the forest. It's for DBAs and IT managers who need to make smart decisions about deployment without getting distracted by the details of implementation. Highly recommended for decision makers. Not recommended for programmers or hands-on DBAs.

Too short to be really useful for anything more than a quick review.