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New book coming out

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Dow Jones' Denis Gobo interviewed me recently about the new book some colleagues and I have got coming out.  You can find the interview here.  For those who don't know, I am the editor for a new book coming out in December entitled SQL Server 2005 Practical Troubleshooting.  The book explores troubleshooting hairy SQL Server problems (should make a nice stocking stuffer for that DBA on your Xmas list <g>). 

I've long felt that in-depth SQL Server troubleshooting was, for a variety of reasons, under-documented.  In some cases, it has been undocumented altogether.  There are books our there that talk about how SQL Server works, and there are plenty that tell you how to build apps based on it, but few talk about what to do when it's broken. 

Fortunately, SQL Server doesn't break that often.  But when problems do occur, they can be life-and-death serious.  People build an astounding number and variety of critical apps on SQL Server.  I wanted to produce a book for those people--one that delved into what to do when SQL Server has serious issues.  I wanted to create a valuable resource people can turn to when they get paged in the middle of the night because their server is sick. 

So, I assembled a crack team of developers from the SQL Server development team (Gus Hill, Cesar Galindo-Legaria, Sameer Tejani, Santtu Voutilainen, Slava Oks, and Wei Xiao) along with some of the top support engineers for the product (Bart Duncan, Bob Ward, and Cindy Gross); provided ample amounts of raw meat and pestering; threw in some rudimentary editing services and got them to document what has previously lived almost exclusively in the craniosphere.

Each author's troubleshooting approach comes out in the book, and I think readers will benefit from the diversity of perspective.  There are often multiple ways to solve problems, and readers will be exposed to a healthy assortment of them in this book.  That said, I hope readers will see much of the commonality between the different problem types and methodologies.  There are a number of common threads readily evident throughout the book that I'm hopeful readers will take note of and find useful. 

Every developer who worked on the book is a seasoned developer.  Every support engineer who participated in the project is a veteran support engineer.  They have all spent years solving hard SQL Server problems.  I'm excited to have been a small part of codifying their vast knowledge on the subject in a way that is accessible to the SQL Server community.  You'll have to let us know what you think once the book is out.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 12, 2006
    Hi Ken I'll certainly be adding it to my list!

  • Anonymous
    October 31, 2006
    Looking forward to this one :-)

  • Anonymous
    November 10, 2006
    Hi Ken, I have just read your interview for this new book and found out you are doing the new edition of the Guru's Guide for TSQL which will come out next year. Can't wait for that. Please post your progress on that and let us know when you are done. We love your books!

  • Anonymous
    February 01, 2007
    Hi. Ken. Begun to read the book SQL Server 2005 -Practical Troubleshooring and having read  Chapter 1 -  I then thought i'll get the code off the CD and play... Unfortunately none of the code,  apart for a a few snippets of sql from a couple of chapters, are not on the cd, even when you reference them.  No issues, but Can you provide a zip file of the code you reference to. By the way like your 'Aging Champion' Best regards Leon