This book presents the collective wisdom of more than 30 of today's leading SQL Server experts. This high-powered group is writing because of another passion it shares--all author royalties will be donated to help child victims of war, worldwide.

This is not an ordinary SQL Server Book. SQL Server MVP Deep Dives brings together the world's most highly-regarded SQL Server experts to create a masterful collection of tips, techniques, and experience-driven best practices for SQL Server development and administration. These SQL Server MVPs-53 in all-each selected a topic of great interest to them, and in this unique book, they share their knowledge and passion with you. SQL Server MVP Deep Dives is organized into five parts: Design and Architecture, Development, Administration, Performance Tuning and Optimization, and Business Intelligence. Within each part, you'll find a collection of brilliantly concise and focused chapters that take on key topics like mobile data strategies, Dynamic Management Views, or query performance. The range of subjects covered is comprehensive, from database design tips to data profiling strategies for BI. Additionally, the authors of this book have generously donated 100% of their royalties to support War Child International. War Child International is a network of independent organizations, working across the world to help children affected by war. War Child was founded upon a fundamental goal: to advance the cause of peace through investing hope in the lives of children caught up in the horrors of war. War Child works in many different conflict areas around the world, helping hundreds of thousands of children every year. Visit www.warchild.org for more information. Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book.

SQL Server Hardware will provide the fundamental knowledge and resources you need to make intelligent decisions about choice, and optimal installation and configuration, of SQL Server hardware, operating system and the SQL Server RDBMS.

Summary SQL Server MVP Deep Dives, Volume 2 is a unique book that lets you learn from the best in the business - 64 SQL Server MVPs offer completely new content in this second volume on topics ranging from testing and policy management to integration services, reporting, and performance optimization techniques...and more. About this Book To become an MVP requires deep knowledge and impressive skill. Together, the 64 MVPs who wrote this book bring about 1,000 years of experience in SQL Server administration, development, training, and design. This incredible book captures their expertise and passion in 60 concise, hand-picked chapters and offers valuable insights for readers of all levels. SQL Server MVP Deep Dives, Volume 2 picks up where the first volume leaves off, with completely new content on topics ranging from testing and policy management to integration services, reporting, and performance optimization. The chapters fall into five parts: Architecture and Design, Database Administration, Database Development, Performance Tuning and Optimization, and Business Intelligence. Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book. What's Inside Discovering servers with PowerShell Using regular expressions in SSMS Tuning the Transaction Log for OLTP Optimizing SSIS for dimensional data Real-time BI and much more Manning Publications and the authors of this book support the children of Operation Smile, an international children's medical charity that performs free reconstructive surgery for children suffering from facial deformities such as cleft lips and cleft palates by mobilizing medical volunteers who provide education and training programs to local doctors on the latest surgical techniques. =============================================== Table of Contents PART 1 ARCHITECTURE Edited by Louis Davidson PART 2 DATABASE ADMINISTRATION Edited by Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp PART 3 DATABASE DEVELOPMENT Edited by Paul Nielsen PART 4 PERFORMANCE TUNING AND OPTIMIZATION Edited by Brad M. McGehee PART 5 BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE Edited by Greg Low

Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) are a significant and valuable addition to the DBA's troubleshooting armory, laying bare previously unavailable information regarding the under-the-covers activity of your database sessions and transactions. Why, then, aren't all DBAs using them? Why do many DBAs continue to ignore them in favour of "tried and trusted" tools such as sp_who2, DBCC OPENTRAN, and so on, or make do with the "ready made" reports built into SSMS? Why do even those that do use the DMVs speak wistfully about "good old sysprocesses"? There seem to be two main factors at work. Firstly, some DBAs are simply unaware of the depth and breadth of the information that is available from the DMvs, or how it might help them troubleshoot common issues. This book investigates all of the DMVs that are most frequently useful to the DBA in investigating query execution, index usage, session and transaction activity, disk IO, and how SQL Server is using or abusing the operating system. Secondly, the DMVs have a reputation of being difficult to use. In the process of exposing as much useful data as possible, sysprocesses has been de-normalized, and many new views and columns have been added. This fact, coupled with the initially-baffling choices of what columns will be exposed where, has lead to some DBAs to liken querying DMVs to "collecting mystic spells." In fact, however, once you start to write your own scripts, you'll see the same tricks, and similar join patterns, being used time and again. As such, a relatively small core set of scripts can be readily adapted to suit any requirement. This book is here to de-mystify the process of collecting the information you need to troubleshoot SQL Server problems. It will highlight the core techniques and "patterns" that you need to master, and will provide a core set of scripts that you can use and adapt for your own systems, including how to: * Root out the queries that are causing memory or CPU pressure on your system * Investigate caching, and query plan reuse * Identify index usage patterns * Track fragmentation in clustered indexes and heaps * Get full details on blocking and blocked transactions, including the exact commands being executed, and by whom. * Find out where SQL Server is spending time waiting for resources to be released, before proceeding * Monitor usage and growth of tempdb The DMVs don't make existing, built-in, performance tools obsolete. On the contrary, they complement these tools, and offer a flexibility, richness and granularity that are simply not available elsewhere. Furthermore, you don't need to master a new GUI, or a new language in order to use them; it's all done in a language all DBAs know and mostly love: T-SQL.

This book is a deep dive into perhaps the single-most important facet of good performance: indexes, and how to best use them. The book begins in the shallow waters with explanations of the types of indexes and how they are stored in databases. Moving deeper into the topic, and further into the book, you will look at the statistics that are accumulated both by indexes and on indexes. You’ll better understand what indexes are doing in the database and what can be done to mitigate and improve their effect on performance. The final destination is a guided tour through a number of real life scenarios showing approaches you can take to investigate, mitigate, and improve the performance of your database. Defines the types of indexes and their implementation options Provides use cases and common patterns in applying indexing Describes and explain the index metadata and statistics Provides a framework of strategies and approaches for indexing databases

Delve inside the core SQL Server engine—and put that knowledge to work—with guidance from a team of well-known internals experts. Whether database developer, architect, or administrator, you’ll gain the deep knowledge you need to exploit key architectural changes—and capture the product’s full potential. Discover how SQL Server works behind the scenes, including: What happens internally when SQL Server builds, expands, shrinks, and moves databases How to use event tracking—from triggers to the Extended Events Engine Why the right indexes can drastically reduce your query execution time How to transcend normal row-size limits with new storage capabilities How the Query Optimizer operates Multiple techniques for troubleshooting problematic query plans When to force SQL Server to reuse a cached query plan—or create a new one What SQL Server checks internally when running DBCC How to choose among five isolation levels and two concurrency models when working with multiple concurrent users