Book-Review

There are a number of key books that I’ve missed reading over the years, in areas that interest me. Recently, I’ve been fixing that. One that is always discussed is The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit by Joy Mundy and Warren Thornthwaite from the Kimball Group.

I would have to say I enjoyed reading it. It is a large book at over 700 pages and a couple of inches thick so it took a while to get through.

2008-07-09

I’ve heard a lot of praise for Scott Ambler’s book: Database Refactoring: Evolutionary Database Design over the past few years. It’s another relatively classic book that I’ve been slow to read.

I often mentioned to people that when I was at a software design review meeting for Microsoft around the DataDude product (Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals), I noticed that Sachin Rekhi from the team was walking around with a copy of this book under his arm. As Sachin was responsible for the refactorings to go into the product and there was only one refactoring (rename) at the time, I thought that was a good sign for where the product might head. I wasn’t aware that he had been a contributor to the book. Sachin wrote some of the opening details.

2008-06-07

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.

2008-06-07

This is another one of those books I picked up in an airport when I ran out of reading material while travelling. One of the key criteria I applied when choosing the book was whether or not I’d finish reading it by the time we landed. We had a bit of a delay boarding so I’d definitely finished it by the time we’d landed. It’s in the quick reads series and it is just that.

2008-06-07

I was on a flight from Houston to Washington via Dallas today. We seemed to sit forever on the tarmac in Dallas, in fact just over 1.5 hours from leaving gate to taking off. It was amazingly silly. The captain warened us that if he had to stop and restart the engines one more time, we’d have had to return to the terminal for more fuel. And we hadn’t even left.

2008-03-31