Customer Reviews

Pro SQL Server 2008 Replication (Expert's Voice in SQL Server)

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

 

 

This book does a good job of explaining how different types of replication work but if you are planning to setup replication properly which is amongst several machines this book will be a great door stopper as it only explains how to setup replication as a distributor, publisher and subscriber on the SAME machine. Who does this? Why would you do that? What good is a replicated copy of a database on the same server if it fails? Then both your production database and your replicated database are toast.

This book would have been useful and worth the nearly $70 if it had explained the very complicated permissions that are required on a domain and server to get replication working. I have been ripping my hair out trying to get the right voodoo mix of permissions to get it working and even after reading this book can't get it to work.

Save your money, the vast majority of this information is already available in the Sql Books Online.

I am only at chapter 2, but this book is starting to anoy me.

I trully believe that the author masters the subject, but explaining it is another job. The conceptual explanation of the Publisher/Subscriber metaphor is intertwingled with SQL Server implementation details. There is no clear separation between concepts and implementation.

But it gets worse. My impression is that the author is not a native English speaker. His message is not formulated precisely; It lacks consistent use of the words "to" and "from" and "request" and "response". Object and subject are not crystal clear. The figures that are supposed to illustrate things are not effective and not coherent with the text. Figure 2-3, for example, tries to illustrate how publishing with a pull subscription works. The figure shows the artifacts "Publisher", "Distributor" and "Subscriber". Numbered arrows should depict the control flow, which is described in text. The arrow labeled "Publisher enables the subscriptions" is inside the artefact "Subscriber". Even worse, the arrow starts at the subscription database, not at the publisher at all.

I think that readers who are new to the subject get lost by this kind of inconsistencies.
That said, there is no other book that devotes so many pages to the subject.
But don't take every word literally.

I am new to SQL Replication & this book helped me understand the replication basics, and understand what options I have and which would be better for a given scenario. Each type of replication is covered to a great extent, followed by backup and recovery. I am still in the initial chapters, the snapshots and the step-by-step explanation helped me understand it well without actually implementing it. However I did not complete the entire book and am not sure what kind of issues would be encountered in real time environment. I still would recommend this book as a stepping stone into the world of SQL Replication.

In short, this is the kind of book that seems written to fill as many pages as possible with the least author effort.

Are you new to SQL Server replication in SQL Server 2008? Or are you experienced enough in SQL Server replication? If so..this is the book for you. The book is organized very well. It first gives you the basics of each type of replication, goes on to describe on how to configure replication in 2 different ways: GUI and T-SQL. I always preferred to use T-SQL for various reasons. It is easily deployable in different database environments and the scripts can be backed up as normal SQL scripts.
I liked all the "internal" and "optimization" chapters on each type of replication. The author has described these chapters well. The book also gives a step by step approach to configure the replication which helps. However, I expected some more details on replication monitoring, replication security/permissions and providing some real world scenarios on replication troubleshooting. I guess there are so many books out there on SQL Server replication but these advanced topics would have made the quality of this book even better.
I will give this book a 4 star and would highly recommend DBAs to refer this book when they are in need of configuring replication.

This is one thorough reference. It begins with an introduction to distributed data, distributed data transactions, eager replication, lazy replication, replication in SQL server, and the benefits of replication.

The book then covers replication basics including the published-subscriber model, the different components of replication, physical replication models, and installing and configuring replication.

Next is a detailed chapter on the types of replication, which include snapshot replication, transactional replication, and merge replication.

Then there are several chapters on configuring snapshot generation, transactional replication, and merge replication. Each is covered with a chapter on configuring with a GUI, configuring using T - SQL, and the internals of each type of replication. Merge replication also includes a chapter on web synchronization with merge replication.

After that backup and recovery, and optimizing, are covered for each type of replication.

The book ends with a chapter on heterogeneous replication and how to connect with oracle to do replication.

There are a ton of screenshots and a lot of code. This allows you to read the book without having a computer nearby to look at the examples in full. The book also contains a lot of tables which give great snapshots of the different parts involved with replication.

There is a code download. The download includes text files for each chapter which contains the code samples for that chapter.

The book is very well organized and has a very logical flow to it. The author also has a good writing style which makes reading a book on merge replication, which usually would not be too pleasant, a very enjoyable read.

All in all I do not think there is a more comprehensive resource for information on how to accomplish replication in a real-world production environment.

I highly recommend this book to anyone involved with replication in SQL server 2008.