Product Description

A comprehensive, hands-on reference for database developers and administrators, this book focuses on advanced querying techniques using Transact-SQL (T-SQL), the database programming language built into SQL Server. Includes code and table examples.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4118 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-26
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 632 pages

From the Publisher
Key Book Benefits: -Delivers practical, hands-on guidance on sophisticated uses of T-SQL, including the differences between logical and physical processing, nesting of queries, and much more -Provides deep background information that helps developers optimize queries, aggregate data, and develop hierarchies and recursive queries -Helps promote mastery of T-SQL -Features numerous code and table examples, practical advice, logic puzzles, and best practices

About the Author
The primary author, Itzik Ben-Gan, is a Principal Mentor and Founder of Solid Quality Learning. A SQL Server Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) since 1999, Itzik has delivered dozens of training events across the U.S. and Europe focused on T-SQL programming, performance tuning and internals, administration, implementation, data warehousing, and online analytical processing (OLAP). An accomplished author, Itzik has written many articles for SQL Server Magazine, as well as articles and white papers for MSDN®. Itzik’s speaking activities have included Tech·Ed, DevWeek, PASS, SQL Server Connections, and SQLU Summits, to name a few.

Lubor Kollar is a program manager on the SQL Server team at Microsoft Corporation who focuses on optimization.

Dejan Sarka is a Solid Quality Learning Associate Mentor.

Customer Reviews

Excellelent Intermediate or review
Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005: T-SQL Querying (Solid Quality Learning)

This is a great reference or review text. The content is fairly meaty and will take some chewing. For example, the book starts right off by breaking down the query engine process into it’s processing steps and taking the reader through examples of the result sets at each step in the process. It might be overwhelming for someone starting out, but it’s a great place to dive into a deeper understanding of the data engine.

An excellent contribution to the “Inside-SQL” series
This is the 2nd book of the 4 part “Inside-SQL” series, with each book I imagine, appealing to a different reader. Having a programming background, I enjoyed this book more than the first in the series (”The Storage Engine”), which on it’s own is also an excellent book.

As mentioned in other reviews, this book is definitely not for beginners. The authors assumes a basic level of SQL knowledge from the reader as he launches into complex Transact-SQL examples - unlike most books which start the reader with simple SQL examples and progress through to complex ones.

While reading this book, it was easy to compare it’s contents with Ken Henderson’s popular “A Guru’s Guide to Transact-SQL”, with the latter book becoming more and more outdated by the improvements in Transact-SQL since it was published. If you’re a fan of Henderson, you will quickly become a fan of Itzik.

A benefit of this book is that unlike most SQL 2005 books, this is not an update on SQL 2000 material, but instead starts at the 2005 level. The author focuses on the new syntax introduced in SQL 2005, and then, moves onto older SQL 2000 syntax and compares both the complexity and the performance differences between the two. This itself is invaluable to those of use that code in Transact-SQL and feel more comfortable using the “old ways”. This book highlights how the new syntax is in fact simpler and more efficient - we just need to take the time and effort to understand and become familiar with the new language changes.

The book starts by discussing the logical processing of a SELECT statement, which helps the reader to understand the hows and whys of writing a query. I finally understood why I can’t use an expression’s alias in a WHERE BY or GROUP BY clause (as the SELECT line is one of the last parts of the statement to be processed). Throughout the book, the author often defines a problem and allows the reader to formulate an appropriate solution. He then reveals MULTIPLE solutions and explains why each is good or bad. The book ends with a selection of “logic puzzles” that test the reader’s ability to solve logical problems. This was both fun and informative.

After reading this book, I found myself changing the way I constructed SQL queries at work - for the better!

Pedantic
The MS SQL books have dramatically risen in quality in a few short years. When SQL 7 and 2000 were released, there were may be 1-3 book which were truly outstanding. For SQL 2005, however, there are at least 5-10 books which are truly worthwhile and this is one of them.

The reason why the quality of books has risen is the expertise of the authors. For this book, the authors are either MS SQL MVP or have been involved with the creation of MS SQL at Microsoft.

Generally speaking, the book has high level expert description of the underlying MS SQL 2005 architecture and T-SQL commands. But it lacks a nice flowing writing style which hempers the understanding to a willing reader. This book is an another example of authors who are inept at explaining the subject matter which they are an expert much like a professor who can’t teach.

I also felt some parts of the book were sloppy or not as detailed. For example, the authors state that one of the steps of T-SQL query tuning is the need to correlate wait stats with problematic queries. Yet they never provide an adequate example (other than providing a useless query of SYS.DM_OS_PERFORMANCE_COUNTERS table) of how to connect wait stat with a specific transaction. This is a huge missing link.

PROS:
1)Awesome details on Indexes and Query plans
2)Solid advice on how to improve T-SQL for better performance.

Cons:
1)Not for the beginners. The book goes straight to the harder subjects (PIVOT, APPLY, complex joins etc).
2)Does not cover simple or fundamental subject matters.