Part V. Performance

Performance is at the heart of many day-to-day DBA activities. The first chapter in this section covers all the usual suspects, including: concurrency, isolation levels, execution plans, parallelism, and query store. Any one of these areas could lead to substantial query performance (or equally degradation).

The second chapter in this section concentrates on indexes, these are typically the primary means of improving query performance. Topics covered include clustered, rowstore, columnstore, filtered, and missing indexes. The importance and use of statistics is noted. The chapter ends with an overview of the other indexes i.e. full-text, special, and XML. There’s an interesting discussion on using heaps or rather not to use them. There’s also a useful section on gathering metrics on index usage, together with some helpful code.

Part VI. Cloud

Increasingly there is a movement away from on-premise databases to cloud hosted databases. I have a friend at Microsoft who said their biggest problem is trying to keep up with the demand for cloud solutions.

This section opens with a background explaining the various ideas and terms behind the cloud. This progresses into separate chapters on provisioning Azure SQL databases (both Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance). To help with the move to the cloud, there’s a very helpful chapter on migrating SQL Server solutions to Azure. The section on the Azure Data Migration Assistant is particularly useful (it’s also excellent for migrating to non-Azure databases too).

While the use of on-premise SQL Servers will continue into the near future, the move towards cloud usage continues unabated – definitely a topic to invest your future career growth in.

Conclusion

This book aims to update your DBA skills to cover SQL Server 2022 - and succeeds. It is generally easy to read and filled with useful incidental tips that come from experienced DBAs. Sometimes it feels like overhearing experienced DBAs talk about their subject. Of course, no book can be comprehensive, but it is both wide-ranging and has a depth of detail.

This should probably not be your first SQL Server admin book - that book should be filled with step-by-step instruction on how to perform various standard admin tasks. Whereas this book assumes you know how to perform the standard admin tasks (it does provide an overview for you), but instead concentrates on areas that contain pitfalls and best practices.

In many ways, it’s a perfect follow-on book to read after you’ve read a more standard admin book. I would suggest you first read Peter Carter’s “Pro SQL Server 2022 Administration,” and then read this current book.

Disclaimer: I was the technical reviewer for “Pro SQL Server 2022 Administration”, but not for the first edition, which I reviewed for I Programmer. 

Verdict: Overall, an excellent SQL Server 2022 catch-up book for seasoned DBAs. Highly recommended. 

• For recommendations booksof SQL Server Books, see Pick Of The Shelf - SQL Server in Programmer's Bookshelf.

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