Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Book review: SQL Server 2008 Internals

One of the topics I'm interested in is performance of a database. Based on this topic I read the book SQL Server 2008 Internals. I enjoyed to read this book. It is easy to read and usefull for people with and without knowledge of previous versions of SQL Server. After reading this book it will help you to better understand the performance of your SQL Server configuration and databases. I can imagine that everybody has it's own favorite topics when reading this book. This is the list of my  favorite topics:

  • SQL Server Resource Governor
  • Indexes: Internals and Management
    • Tools for analyzing indexes.
    • Data modification Internals
    • Managing index structures
  • Special Storage
    • Sparse columns
    • Data compression
  • The query optimizer
    • Optimizer architecture
    • Statistics, Cardinality Estimation and Costing
    • Index selection
    • Plan Hinting
  • Plan Caching and Recompilation
    • Cache mechanisme
    • Plan cache internals.
  • DBCC Internals.
I think it is a usefull investment of only 52 Euro (60 US Dollar). It is a must to have for every DBA'er who wants to deliver the best performance of his SQL server environment to his users. This also applies to software engineers who want to build well performing applications on SQL Server.

Happy reading.

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