Book: Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Query Tuning and Optimization

I haven’t posted up any book reviews recently so it’s time to catch up a bit. For some reason, it had taken me ages to get to read Kalen’s latest book in the Inside SQL Server series: Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - Query Tuning and Optimization.

As expected, it’s a great piece of work. I very much enjoyed the chapters written by other authors as well, particulary those from Adam Machanic and Craig Freedman. Ron Talmage, Sunil Agarwal and Lubor Kollar have also made strong contributions to this work.

I had wondered what outcome the book would aim for. I found it to be more of a good coverage of many of the things you need to know and have a good understanding of when doing performance tuning, moreso than one that provides a pragmatic approach to what you need to do. Perhaps that’s another book. This book ceratinly provides the background knowledge of much of the internals involved.

Highly recommended reading!

2008-06-07