Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Inside SQL Server 2005

As promised I bought the two Inside SQL Server 2005 books.

Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005: T-SQL Querying
Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005: T-SQL Programming

I'm half way the T-SQL Querying book and it's quite good. Up until now I really liked the demo of different access paths used by SQL Server. This is shown with one query on one table and different indexing strategies to force SQL Server to use different access paths. Another interesting thing to see is the way Itzik rewrites queries on a thousand different ways and each time a little better :-)

I also like the little stories where some 'trivial' things are explained like why people say SEQUEL, the negative logic riddle about the two gates, Halloween, the Gauss story, ... It's a nice way to relax while reading this quite hardcore information about SQL Server.

On to the next half, the next book and by then hopefully the sequel to these 2 :-)