Myself and 52 other SQL Server MVPs have been working on a SQL Server book for the past year or so. All the authors of this book have donated 100% of their royalties to support War Child International. You can visit www.warchild.org to learn more about this charity.

You can already pre-order the book from Amazon here: SQL Server MVP Deep Dives or you can get the early access edition from Manning here: http://www.manning.com/nielsen/

SQL Server MVP Deep Dives is organized into five parts: Design and Architecture, Development, Administration, Performance Tuning and Optimization, and Business Intelligence.

All the chapters are listed below

PART I DATABASE DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE

Paul Nielsen, Editor

1. Louis and Paul’s 10 relational database design rules by Paul Nielsen and Louis Davidson

2. SQL Server tools for maintaining data integrity by Louis Davidson

3. Finding functional dependencies by Hugo Kornelis

PART II DATABASE DEVELOPMENT

Adam Machanic, Editor

1. Set-based iteration: the third alternative by Hugo Kornelis

2. Gaps and islands by Itzik Ben-Gan

3. Error handling in SQL Server and applications by Bill Graziano

4. Pulling apart the FROM clause by Rob Farley

5. What makes a bulk insert a minimally logged operation? by Denis Gobo

6. Avoiding three common query mistakes by Kathi Kellenberger

7. Introduction to XQuery on SQL Server by Michael Coles

8. SQL Server XML frequently asked questions by Michael Coles

9. Using XML to transport relational data by Matija Lah

10. Full text searching by Robert C. Cain

11. Simil: an algorithm to look for similar strings by Tom Van Stiphout

12. LINQ to SQL and the ADO.NET Entity Framework by Bob Beauchemin

13. Table-valued parameters by Don Kiely

14. Build your own index by Erland Sommarskog

15. Getting and staying connected—or not by William Vaughn

16. Extending your productivity in SSMS and Query Analyzer by Pawel Potasinski

17. Why every SQL developer needs to have a tools database by Denis Gobo

18. Deprecation feature by Cristian Lefter

19. Placing SQL Server in your pocket by Christopher Fairbairn

20. Mobile data strategies by John Baird

PART III DATABASE ADMINISTRATION

Kimberly L. Tripp and Paul S. Randal, Editors

1. What does it mean to be a DBA? by Brad McGehee

2. Working with maintenance plans by Tibor Karaszi

3. PowerShell in SQL Server by Richard Siddaway

4. Automating SQL Server management using Server Management Objects by Allen White

5. Practical auditing in SQL Server 2008 by Jasper Smith

6. My favorite DMVs and why by Aaron Bertrand

7. Reusing space in a table by Joe Webb

8. Some practical issues in table partitioning by Ron Talmage

9. Partitioning for manageability (and maybe performance) by Dan Guzman

10. Faster, smaller, and more energy-efficient backups without indexes by Greg Linwood

11. Using database mirroring to become a superhero! by Glenn Berry

12. The poor man’s SQL Server log shipping by Edwin Sarmiento

13. Some understated changes found in SQL Server 2005 replication by Paul Ibison

14. High performance transactional representation by Hilary Cotter

15. Successfully implementing Kerberos delegation by Scott Stauffer

16. Running SQL Server on Hyper-V by John Paul Cook

PART IV PERFORMANCE TUNING AND OPTIMIZATION

Kalen Delaney, Editor

1. When is an unused index not an unused index? by Rob Farley

2. Speeding up queries with index covering by Alex Kuznetsov

3. Tracing the deadlock by Gail Shaw

4. How to optimize tempdb performance by Brad McGehee

5. Does the order of columns in an index matter? by Joe Webb

6. Correlating SQL Profiler with Windows Performance Monitor by Kevin Kline

7. Using correlation to improve query performance by Gert-Jan Strik

8. Dr. DMV: how to use Dynamic Management Views by Glenn Berry

9. Query performance and disk I/O counters by Linchi Shea

10. XEVENT: the next event infrastructure for SQL Server by Cristian Lefter

PART V BI DEVELOPMENT

Greg Low, Editor

1. BI for the relational guy by Erin Welker

2. Unlocking the secrets of SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services by William Vaughn

3. Reporting Services tips and tricks by Bruce Loehle-Conger

4. SQL Server Audit: change tracking or change data capture? by Aaron Bertrand

5. Introduction to SSAS data mining by Dejan Sarka

6. To aggregate or not to aggregate: is there really a question? by Erin Welker

7. Incorporating data profiling in the ETL process by John Welch

8. Expressions in SQL Server Integration Services by Matthew Roche

9. SSIS performance tips by Phil Brammer

10. Incremental loads using T-SQL and SSIS by Andy Leonard

As you can see the list of authors of this book consist of a lot of well known SQL Server gurus who answer questions in newsgroups, write books, are involved with podcasts and have blogs. You probably already know most of these people.

I reviewed several chapters for this book and wrote two chapters myself; these chapters are Chapter 8 (What makes a bulk insert a minimally logged operation?) and chapter 20 (Why every SQL developer needs to have a tools database). One of the things I like about this book is that you can start reading any chapter you want; there is no need to first finish a number of different chapters before you will understand what the chapter you want to read about. All chapters are self contained. You want to learn how to optimize tempdb performance? Then read chapter 43.

All in all I think this book is good for any SQL Server developer/administrator. Amazon has the book listed at 37% off the list price, so hurry up and pre-order today. And if you are not a SQL Server developer/administrator, remember this could be a nice stocking stuffer for that DBA at work 🙂

*** If you have a SQL related question try our Microsoft SQL Server Programming forum or our Microsoft SQL Server Admin forum