SQL Server 2008 Administration in Action by Rod Colledge is a fantastic generalist tome. Earlier in the summer I had been on the search for a book that would take me through SQL Server administration from A-to-Z. And it was on the recommendation of Brent Ozar ( Blog | @BrentO ) that I check this book out. I couldn’t have been happier with my choice.

Style

Rod (Blog) has a casual style to his writing, which I enjoyed as this kind of material can get dry quickly. This was the book that I chose to read in the jury room, and at times the experience grew quite intimate: that he were simply sharing his experience, his secrets, and his SQL Server voodoo with me. Any technical work that can make me feel as though I’m having a conversation gets high marks in my opinion.

Information

As I mentioned before, the book covers the administrative aspects of SQL Server from beginning to end. This isn’t deep-dive material, and you’d certainly not get your MCM using this book as prep material, but Rod’s work lays out all the options as well as how to accomplish them.

The book is broken up into three major sections. Planning and Installation covers the “SQL Server landscape,” the basics of installing SQL Server following best practices, and even some physical server design. The Configuration section covers Security concerns, configuring your new installation of SQL Server, as well as policy-based and data management. The final section, Operations, covers the rest of what a production DBA would be looking for: backups, high availability, DBCC, indexing and the like.

While I gained the most from the last section, and that was the information for which I was thirsting, I most enjoyed the first section on Planning and Installation. I’m a bit of a hardware nut and so I relished the portions that talked about hardware and how to best integrate it with SQL Server. It made me wish for the opportunity to build a SQL Server box from the ground up and it gave the best practices for doing it.

The chapter I had the most trouble getting through was on security. Maybe security is the dryest of all topics, but it became my white whale. The information in the chapter was good, don’t misread me, and there is even some really cool stuff in there like how to perform a SQL injection attack. It’s just something about the overall flow of that particular chapter that hindered me.

Recommendations

If you feel like you’ve been flailing around the backend of Management Studio, pressing a bunch of buttons and not certain that you’re doing much of anything: stop now. Go and buy Rod’s book, read it, and then begin to lay down your SQL Server plans. The lessons in this book will (for the most part) apply to both 2008 and 2005, and so you’ll be well off as long as your environments are of these later versions. And I even feel as though I owe some of my SQL Cruise preparation to what I read here. Like I mentioned before, this book won’t make you a SQL Server wizard, but it will give you the knowledge to work correctly, purposefully and in follwing best practices. For any junior DBA, you really can’t ask for any more.