Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - T-SQL Programming (2006) ebook

Understanding the internals of storage in SQL Server helps database developers and administrators to better create, maintain, and mine information from enterprise data. This practical, hands-on book focuses on the SQL Server 2005 Storage Engine and delves deep into the structures used for storing data, including files, tables, indexes, and data types. Topics also include security details, with coverage of the new SQL Server 2005 security model, and data protection through the backup and restore algorithms. With pragmatic advice, best practices, extensive code samples, and table examples, developers and database administrators will find the guidance they need to better understand how to build powerful, efficient databases.

This book is perhaps the best book out there for understanding SQL 2005 architecture. I know of no other book which offers such advanced understanding of how SQL 2005 stores, retrives, and manages data.

Indeed, the author is a MS SQL MVP and has written with collaboration of those who have wrote the code for MS SQL 2005 at Microsoft.

The author's explaination, however, could be a lot better. For example, here is an exerpt on the author's explaination of IAM (Index Allocation Map):

"An IAM page contains a page header; an IAM page header, which contains eight page pointer slots; and a set of bits that map a range of extents on a file, which doesn't neccessarily have to be the same file that IAM page is in. The header has address of first extent in the range mapped by the IAM. The eight page pointer slots might contain pointers to pages belonging to the relevant object contained in mixed extents; only the first IAM for an object has values in these pointers."

Now, I have worked with databases for over a decade and have good understanding of Indexes and its structure, and I still did not understand what the author was talking about on some sentences.

Pros:
1)Explains data and index storage structures (Page, extents, B-Tree, Keys etc) and how they are managed in transactions (update, delete, insert) better than any book I know.
2)Relatively short book (400 pages) which does not waste words or sentences to make it a thicker book (common practice to write a thicker book for a higher price).

Cons:
1)Tries to combine MS SQL 101 topics (What is Master, MSDB, TEMP, and MODEL db?) with expert subject matter (What is IAM, Cluster Keys, RID, etc).
2)Writing is sometimes indecipherable.
3)Mostly not for the beginners (despite its rudimentrary coverage of the basics).

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