Book: Pro SQL Server Disaster Recovery - James Luetkehoelter

I caught up with James Luetkehoelter at the PASS Summit in Germany a few months back. He sent me a copy of his new book from APress: Pro SQL Server Disaster Recovery.

I managed to finish reading it while heading back from CodeCampSA in Adelaide today (which was a good solid event again - excellent work Peter Griffiths!). I quite enjoyed the book and I like James’ writing style. It’s quite conversational and I could hear him talking to me as I read it.

The content is a pretty solid coverage of backup/recovery, mirroring, clustering, snapshots, disaster recovery planning, etc. I would have to say I wouldn’t agree with everything James said in the book (he mentions that a number of his colleagues wouldn’t anyway) but overall it’s pretty solid common sense.

I did find a few copy-edit problems that I don’t normally see on APress books. That puzzled me. For example, knowing how to restore a master database is an important skill. The book says “just enter the commands in figure 3.9” but figure 3.9 is a different version of the screenshot from figure 3.7 and nothing to do with the master database. Fortunately, these sorts of things were few and far between and didn’t detract much from the overall book.

Recommended! (particularly for those wanting more of a discussion on “what” to do and “why”, rather than “how”).

2008-07-13