tl;dr – I do not recommend this book. I was so incredibly excited when it was originally announced. A book published by VMware Press, written by prominent VMware, SQL, and storage consultants? GREAT! So much has changed in those topics over the last few years, and it’s high time we got official word on how to…
I read a lot of technical books – stuff on SQL Server, VMware, storage – and they all start to blend together. Within the first few pages of reading SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers by Pinal Dave and Vinod Kumar, though, it jumped out and grabbed me because it’s really different. When buying this…
Here’s what I’ve been reading lately on the SQL Server front. I’d like to thank all three authors and publishers for providing these books for review. Securing SQL Server by Denny Cherry Paperback – Kindle Denny’s a jack of all trades, and a Microsoft Certified Master of SQL Server to boot. I’ve had the pleasure…
You probably only buy a couple of SQL Servers per year. You probably just tell your sysadmins, “I need a 2-socket server with 32GB of memory,” and then you just assume everything’s okay. Scratch that. Let’s be honest. It’s just us here, you and me, so I can be frank. You don’t trust those bozos. …
I usually hate architecture books. I can’t stand ’em. Seems like every one I’ve ever read has been targeted at architecture astronauts – people who spend all their time talking theory, not practice. This book is different. Reading this book is like having drinks in the pub with a team of rock star consultants who’ve…
How do you become a DBA? Usually the answer is, “By accident.” You’re a developer or a Windows admin, minding your own business, when the company acquires a SQL Server or somebody installs SQL on a server somewhere. Since you’re the closest thing to a DBA in the shop, your manager asks you to keep…
This week I’m focusing on books and the book business. Today I’ll be covering the money thing for authors, and tomorrow I’ll be reviewing a book I like for both the content and the business. Enjoy! Now that I’m holding a physical copy of our book in my hand, the pain of the experience has…
This book paid for itself in less than ten minutes. I do consulting work on the side, and like many consultants, I’m never sure if I’m quoting the right billable rate. When I picked up this book several months ago, the first thing I did was turn to chapter 12, “Putting a Price on Your…
This week I’m focusing on how you can improve your blog. So far I’ve discussed how to build your momentum by scheduling posts ahead of time, the basics of search engine optimization, and how to spice things up with pictures. Tomorrow’s post will finish up the series with a book recommendation for bloggers of all…
You, dear reader, probably don’t work in the marketing department. The vast majority of my readers are information technology professionals, and the rest are my family. (Hi, Mom!) Today, you can’t get a job like mine without knowing how whuffie works. In the not-too-distant future, you may not even be able to get a job…
My gauge of an amazing book is simple: if I’ve got a question, and I reach for the book BEFORE I search the web, then it’s an amazing book. Several times in the last two weeks, I reached for this book first.
Let’s start with the obvious: yes, there’s a man on the cover smoking something. It’s probably not a coincidence that when I started writing this review, the iTunes Genius started playing Poison’s “Nothin’ But A Good Time.” There’s a reason they call it the Genius, and yes, I do have Poison in my MP3 collection,…
Production database administrators have to know at least a little about a lot of things: How to install or upgrade SQL Servers How to build clusters How to plan for disaster recovery and high availability How to do performance tuning How to secure and protect databases The production role revolves around management, not creation. Sure,…
Here’s my favorite SQL Server books for 2016-2014: T-SQL Fundamentals – (updated for SQL 2016) – don’t be fooled by this “fundamentals” title, because everybody who writes T-SQL queries needs this book. It’s the manual we should have been given when we started, and everyone’s going to learn something about concurrency, performance, and updates here. T-SQL Querying…
