Microsoft® SQL Server(TM) 2000 High Availability (Paperback)

~ Allan Hirt (Author), Cathan Cook (Author), Kimberly L. Tripp (Author), Frank McBath (Author) "Unfortunately, tomorrow is the busiest day of the week and the databases must be fully functional by 8 A.M..." (more)
Key Phrases: log shipping solution, differential database backup, log shipped database, Network Load Balancing, Server Agent, Enterprise Manager (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Ensuring 24/7 database availability is crucial to your company’s success. Discover the best ways to help keep your critical, Microsoft SQL Server 2000–based systems up and running—and secure—with this in-depth guide, straight from the source.

Product Details

• Paperback: 784 pages
• Publisher: Microsoft Press (August 6, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735619204
• ISBN-13: 978-0735619203
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.4 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #710,982 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars New High Availability Wizard for SQL Server 2000, October 14, 2003

By A Customer

I had to say something here. Everyone got so used to everything being easy in windows, they don't want to hear about also having to know what their doing. Do you think running big available db's is a step-by-step process that Bill left out of the books online? One book can't teach you a college degree worth of information.

This book was right on track and the cluster and log ship info just isn't anywhere else. I agree replication was light, but who runs repl for availability anyway? The book put some humor into a grim subject, so it comes across not so serious, but at least it wasn't boring or a reprint of books online. The last chapter had monitoring info you can't get anywhere else, and it was worth the price of the book. Take a look at the cd, there's some kick-A stuff on it, like what looks like another chapter on performance issues effecting uptime.

What some of you guys write here and in thse newsgroups just proves that Bill's worse problems are not in his software. If you're serious about software, you keep up with it. If Microsoft saw some use in trying to get the word out by printing a late book on sql and getting some big name writers to do it, then I'm reading it. Are you going to ignore it because of some guy off the internet? Remember we're talking availability here, so its not the million dollar question.

I'm giving the book four stars. It skimmed over some things it should of covered (like performance, operations, qa testing, handling heterogenous systems, and some other stuff) and it should be a series of books, not just one huge one. It wouldn't hurt if they could referenced non-microsoft books for some subjects that aren't software. Plus it should have more on running high availability systems without clustering or fancy hardware. Only some databases that have to be up all the time run on Enterprise Edition. But everyone will blame Bill if their system is down. Don't they know that by now?

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must Have for SQL 2000 / 2003 Server Administrators, July 30, 2003

By	"contiguous1" (South Frankston, Vic, Australia) - See all my reviews

This book is the fast track way to gain confidence in deploying a Microsoft SQL 2000 or 2003 Virtual Server.
Even if you have deployed SQL clusters, this book will probably have a few gems that you haven't seen.
The references to the 2003 Operating System are excellent.
The chapters on disk configuration, deployment and Service Packs are valuable in the real World.
The Authors have given you a complete process for rolling out a successfule SQL deployment. The fact is that planning and process are the key to a rollout and this book has that and the technical stuff we all love.
If you only buy one book on SQL and high availability deployment, this is the one.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Decent but not great, September 11, 2003

By	Terry McNair (Boca Raton, FLA) - See all my reviews

I liked some things about this book:

cluster chapter
hardware coverage
Windows Server 2003 tidbits

I didn't like other things:

replication coverage - way to short to be useful. Doesn't tell much about high availability in relation to replicaton.

bad advice - several things they recommend even I know better than to do. I got to the point where I started ingoring the recommendations and just hunted for facts to help me form my own conclusions.

performance stuff -- its to weak and not discussed as much as it should be. I think you need to really go into performance issues when you talk about high availability because poor performance makes a system less available.

I guess the final word is that this is a decent book that you might want to get if SQL SERVER high availability is something you need to know about. Just don't expect a great book.